Lynn, MA Tier 4
Tier 4 · mixed schools · 9 miles from downtown Boston, about 40 minutes door-to-door at peak · 48% of households own their home.
marks the Massachusetts median of $750k for a 4BR, $8,800 in tax and 62 min to Boston. Prices and the tax bill are estimates, not appraisals.
About Lynn
Lynn is a fourth-tier school district north-east of Boston, about 9 miles from downtown Boston as the crow flies and 40 minutes door-to-door at peak, and moderately priced by Massachusetts standards: roughly $650k for a 4BR house and $390k for a 2BR condo. The residential rate is $10.30 per $1,000, about average for Massachusetts, but on a $650k house that is still about $6,700 a year. Commuter rail runs downtown in about 28 minutes, against a 40-minute peak drive. The district sits in the 2nd percentile statewide on MCAS. 'The City of Sin' rebrand is underway: ocean frontage, art deco stock, trains straight downtown.
The good, the bad, the ugly
EditorialOcean frontage, art-deco building stock, and a direct downtown train — the last close-in bargain.
Schools are among the lowest-scoring in our set.
The Lynnway is a six-lane barrier between the city and its own waterfront.
Schools and child caremixed schools · 2nd MCAS · 24 schools
Public elementary & middle schools
24 public schools in Lynn — 18 elementary, 3 middle, 1 early-childhood and 2 all-grades
These are assigned by address, not chosen. A regional district’s schools appear on every member town’s page. Charters are public but allocated by lottery, and are listed separately below.
Before kindergarten
| Licensed programs | 262 |
| Licensed places, all ages | 4,913 |
| Places in centers | 3,055 |
| Places in family child care | 1,858 |
| Infant & toddler places in centers | 343 |
| Preschool places in centers | 1,001 |
| Head Start programs | 2 |
Licensed capacity is not availability. These are places programs may operate, not vacancies. The age split covers centers only — family programs report no breakdown, so 343 is a floor on infant care here, not a count of it.
MA Dept. of Early Education and Care, pulled 2026-08-02 · search current openings
Public School Rankings
| Publisher ranking | Result |
|---|---|
| SchoolDigger | #347 of 361 MA localities |
| Official Massachusetts data (DESE) | Result |
|---|---|
| MCAS achievement | 2nd percentile statewide |
| Student growth (SGP) | 50th percentile |
| 4-year graduation rate | 75.6% |
| DESE accountability | Moderate progress toward targets |
Each publisher ranks a different thing. A district, a locality, or one high school, each by its own method — shown separately, never blended.
MCAS percentile is the district’s statewide rank on % Meeting/Exceeding expectations, ELA + Math.
Look up Lynn on Niche · SchoolDigger · U.S. News · DESE district profiles
Charter School Options
4 charter schools near Lynn
Admission is by lottery, not address — a seat is never guaranteed. Some charters here are alternative or recovery high schools enrolling students already off-track, so their MCAS and graduation figures are not comparable with a traditional school’s.
Public and tuition-free; results from DESE
Available Private School Options
14 of the 107 private schools in Lynn and within 12 miles
Tuition is an estimated range by school type, not school-published pricing — a parochial school and an independent day school are priced very differently. Private schools sit no MCAS, so no figure here is a state measure.
How to read this list
Schools within 12 miles of Lynn, from the MA DESE 2025–26 non-public enrollment report plus the Niche ranking of Massachusetts private high schools. Tuition shown as an estimated range by school type, grades and region — not school-published pricing. A parochial school and an independent day school are priced very differently, so treat these as a starting point and confirm with the school. Niche ranks private high schools only, so an elementary school never carries a number; where one shows a letter instead, that is Niche’s own overall grade, which reaches schools no ranked list does. Neither is a state measure — private schools sit no MCAS and report no results to Massachusetts. That Niche extract is also partial, so a school showing neither was not judged and found wanting; it may simply not have been in it. Student numbers are the figure schools do report, from the same DESE return. Where a student-teacher ratio is shown it is students over full-time-equivalent teachers in the federal Private School Universe Survey, 2021–22, the most recent published — a rough guide to class size, not a class size, and not a ranking either. It is shown only where that survey and the state agree on how many pupils the school has, which is why many schools here have none. Accreditation comes from the AISNE member directory, which records whether a school holds AISNE or NEASC accreditation — the two split the work by age rather than compete, AISNE taking the elementary and middle schools and NEASC the secondary ones. It means an outside body has reviewed the school against published standards on a ten-year cycle. It is not a measure of results, and its absence is not a mark against a school: plenty are not members at all. That directory is also where the schools marked files no enrolment with the state come from. They are real schools that simply make no return to Massachusetts, so the state holds no size for them and this page can show none — and for those, the grade range is read off AISNE’s age bands rather than taken from the school, so treat it as approximate and confirm with the school.
The vibe of Lynn
What it takes to live here$650k 4BR · ≈$6,700 tax
| To buy | Median price (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4BR / 2BA detached house | $650k |
| 3BR / 2BA townhouse | $525k |
| 2BR condo | $390k |
| Property taxes (FY2026) | $10.30 per $1,000 (1.03%) |
These are modeled estimates, not listings. Each row opens the real Redfin market in ZIP 01905, one of 4 in Lynn, and the two will not match.
| By bedroom count | Median value (Zillow) |
|---|---|
| 3BR home | $607k |
| 5+ BR home | $781k |
Not the same kind of number as the table above. These are Zillow’s observed medians for the middle third of the market at that bedroom count, as of July 2026; the prices above are this site’s estimates for one particular property. They are measuring different things and will not agree. Zillow publishes the bedroom split for houses and condos together, so a “3BR home” here blends both, where each estimate above prices one building type and says which. And 5+ BR means five bedrooms or more: Zillow’s buckets stop at five, so that figure carries the largest houses in Lynn and sits above what a plain five-bedroom median would be.
| To rent | Per month (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4 bedrooms | $3,510/mo |
| 3 bedrooms | $3,180/mo |
| 2 bedrooms | $2,650/mo |
| 1 bedroom | $2,230/mo |
These are benchmark rents, not asking rents. HUD sets them at the 40th percentile of standard-quality units, so a nice single-family will ask more — which is why the links are not capped at the figure beside them.
HUD FY2027 Small Area Fair Market Rents for Lynn’s ZIP codes
Home values over the last decade
| If a $650k house grew at… | 5 yrs | 10 yrs | 15 yrs | 30 yrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7.2% — Lynn’s own last decade | $920k | $1.30M | $1.84M | $5.23M |
| 3% — inflation, holding its real value | $754k | $874k | $1.01M | $1.58M |
These are not forecasts. They are what $650k becomes at a fixed rate, shown for two rates because nobody can tell you which one the next thirty years will bring. The last decade included a period of unusually fast growth across Massachusetts; repeating it for thirty years would be a strong assumption. The inflation row is the conservative case — a house that holds its value and earns nothing beyond it. History from the Zillow Home Value Index, a whole-town index that sits at a different level from the 4BR estimate above and is used here for the trend.
What’s around Lynn
urban
| What’s here | Count |
|---|---|
| Cafés and coffee shops | 5 |
| Bookshops | 0 |
Museums, theatres and galleriesSee the list
1 more is mapped without a name, so it cannot be listed. | 7 |
| Colleges and universities | 0 |
| Public library | Lynn Public Library |
Density is Census population over land area. Café, bookshop and culture counts are what is mapped in OpenStreetMap — a volunteer map, so a well-mapped town looks busier than a thinly-mapped one. Read a low count as “little mapped here”, not “nothing here”. Colleges are active degree-granting institutions in the federal IPEDS directory; enrolment and campus housing capacity are its 2023 figures. The public library comes from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, which lists library systems rather than every branch. These figures describe places, never the people in them — see our methodology.
Census snapshot
| ACS 2020–2024, US Census Bureau | Share |
|---|---|
| Homeowner households | 48% |
| White (non-Hispanic) | 33% |
| Asian (non-Hispanic) | 6.2% |
| Latino / Hispanic | 46% |
| African American (non-Hispanic) | 10% |
Town spending & civic data
| Lynn | Figure |
|---|---|
| Residents | 101,253 |
| Municipal budget | $544.2M |
| School district spending | $417.1M |
| Spending per pupil | $22,388 |
| School spending per resident | $4,119 |
| Subsidized housing (Ch. 40B) | 11.74% |
Budget: FY2025 General Fund total expenditures, DLS Schedule A · Schools: DESE Per Pupil Expenditure · Subsidized housing: Ch. 40B Subsidized Housing Inventory, EOHLC, as of 30 September 2025; the percentage is over year-round housing units counted in the 2020 Census. Never used to rank or filter towns.
Realistic alternatives to Lynn
Surprisingly similar in character
More on Lynn
- Head to head
- Lynn vs WenhamHamilton vs LynnLynn vs Saugus
- Region
- North Shore
- Train commute to
- Kendall Square · about 40 minLongwood Medical Area · about 54 minthe Seaport · about 40 minBack Bay · about 38 minDowntown Boston · about 28 min
Read next
Data statusdata updated September 11, 2026
| Figure | Status |
|---|---|
| Home prices | Estimate |
| Median value by bedroom count | Sourced |
| Property tax rate | Sourced |
| Census shares and homeownership | Sourced |
| Rents | Sourced |
| School data | Sourced |
| Commute | Measured + modeled |
This town’s prices are estimates calibrated against Zillow and Redfin, as described in our methodology. Its tax rate, like every town’s, is the state’s certified FY2026 figure. Data last updated . Full detail on every source is in the methodology.
