Palmer, MA Tier 4
Tier 4 · mixed schools · 65 miles from downtown Boston, about 103 minutes door-to-door at peak · 68% of households own their home.
marks the Massachusetts median of $750k for a 4BR, $9,100 in tax and 62 min to Boston. Prices and the tax bill are estimates, not appraisals.
About Palmer
Palmer is a fourth-tier school district in the Pioneer Valley, about 65 miles from downtown Boston as the crow flies and 103 minutes door-to-door at peak, and one of the more affordable markets we cover: roughly $400k for a 4BR house and $230k for a 2BR condo. The residential rate is $16.50 per $1,000, high for Massachusetts, which on a $400k house works out to about $6,600 a year. There is no MBTA rail here, so the commute is by car. The district sits in the 20th percentile statewide on MCAS. The Quaboag crossroads — four villages, one town.
The good, the bad, the ugly
From the dataAmong the cheapest housing we track — 9th of 241 at about $400k for a 4BR.
About 103 minutes to downtown at peak, and no rail to escape it.
That $16.50 rate is 19th-highest of 241: about $7k a year, every year, forever.
Schools and child caremixed schools · 20th MCAS · 1 schools
Public elementary & middle schools
1 public school in Palmer — 1 middle
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 | 7 |
| Licensed places, all ages | 92 |
| Places in centers | 50 |
| Places in family child care | 42 |
| Infant & toddler places in centers | 0 |
| Preschool places in centers | 50 |
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 0 is a floor on infant care here, not a count of it: no center is licensed for under-threes, but 5 family programs are licensed for mixed ages.
MA Dept. of Early Education and Care, pulled 2026-08-02 · search current openings
Public School Rankings
| Publisher ranking | Result |
|---|---|
| SchoolDigger | #302 of 361 MA localities |
| Official Massachusetts data (DESE) | Result |
|---|---|
| MCAS achievement | 20th percentile statewide |
| Student growth (SGP) | 46th percentile |
| 4-year graduation rate | 94.9% |
| DESE accountability | Substantial 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 Palmer on Niche · SchoolDigger · U.S. News · DESE district profiles
Available Private School Options
6 private schools in Palmer 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 Palmer, 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 Palmer
What it takes to live here$400k 4BR · ≈$6,600 tax
| To buy | Median price (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4BR / 2BA detached house | $400k |
| 3BR / 2BA townhouse | $310k |
| 2BR condo | $230k |
| Property taxes (FY2026) | $16.50 per $1,000 (1.65%) |
These are modeled estimates, not listings. Each row opens the real Redfin market in ZIP 01069, one of 4 in Palmer, and the two will not match.
| To rent | Per month (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4 bedrooms | $2,000/mo |
| 3 bedrooms | $1,850/mo |
| 2 bedrooms | $1,510/mo |
| 1 bedroom | $1,200/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 FY2026 Small Area Fair Market Rents for Palmer’s ZIP codes
Home values over the last decade
| If a $400k house grew at… | 5 yrs | 10 yrs | 15 yrs | 30 yrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6.6% — Palmer’s own last decade | $551k | $758k | $1.04M | $2.72M |
| 3% — inflation, holding its real value | $464k | $538k | $623k | $971k |
These are not forecasts. They are what $400k 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 Palmer
rural
| What’s here | Count |
|---|---|
Cafés and coffee shopsSee the list | 1 |
| Bookshops | 0 |
| Museums, theatres and galleries | 0 |
| Colleges and universities | 0 |
| Public library | Palmer 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 2019–2023 (via MAPC DataCommon) | Share |
|---|---|
| Homeowner households | 68% |
| White (non-Hispanic) | 90% |
| Asian (non-Hispanic) | 1.0% |
| Latino / Hispanic | 5.0% |
| African American (non-Hispanic) | 1.0% |
Town spending & civic data
| Palmer | Figure |
|---|---|
| Residents | 12,448 |
| Municipal budget | $39.6M |
| School district spending | $29.1M |
| Spending per pupil | $23,575 |
| School spending per resident | $2,337 |
| Affordable housing units (Ch. 40B inventory) | 546 |
Budget: FY2025 General Fund total expenditures, DLS Schedule A · Schools: DESE Per Pupil Expenditure · Affordable units: state Subsidized Housing Inventory. Never used to rank or filter towns.
Realistic alternatives to Palmer
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Data statusSome figures preliminary · reviewed August 14, 2026
| Figure | Status |
|---|---|
| Home prices | Preliminary |
| Property tax rate | Preliminary |
| Rents | Sourced |
| School data | Sourced |
| Commute | Measured + modeled |
This community was added after the original hundred, so its prices and tax rate are preliminary estimates pending verification against municipal and census records. Data last reviewed . Full detail on every source is in the methodology.
