South Boston, Boston Tier 4
A Boston neighborhood · Tier 4 · mixed schools · 2 miles from downtown Boston, about 14 minutes door-to-door at peak.
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, and South Boston’s prices are preliminary: not yet checked against sales.
About South Boston
South Boston is a Boston neighborhood about 2 miles from downtown as the crow flies, 14 minutes at peak, and one of the priciest markets in the state: roughly $2M for a 4BR house and $850k for a 2BR condo. Public schools are Boston Public Schools, assigned by lottery rather than by address. The residential rate is $12.40 per $1,000, about average for Massachusetts, but on a $2M house that is still about $24,800 a year. Rapid transit reaches downtown in about 8 minutes, so a car-free commute works. That rail time is modeled, not read off the timetable. Beaches, a booming Seaport edge, and the tightest triple-decker grid in the city.
The good, the bad, the ugly
EditorialCity beaches, a short ride downtown, and the Seaport's jobs next door.
Prices doubled in a decade — the deal is gone.
Space savers, Seaport gridlock, and snow-day parking feuds that occasionally reach the news.
Schools and child caremixed schools · 22nd MCAS
Public schools
South Boston is served by Boston Public Schools. Boston does not assign students by neighborhood alone — families rank schools and receive an assignment through the city’s home-based lottery, so the schools your child can attend depend on your address and the lottery, not on the neighborhood line. The district-wide figures below therefore cover all of Boston, not South Boston specifically.
Before kindergarten
| Licensed programs | 19 |
| Licensed places, all ages | 721 |
| Places in centers | 655 |
| Places in family child care | 66 |
| Infant & toddler places in centers | 163 |
| Preschool places in centers | 336 |
| 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 163 is a floor on infant care here, not a count of it.
Programs licensed in South Boston itself, not citywide. MA Dept. of Early Education and Care, pulled 2026-08-02 · search current openings
Public School Rankings
| Publisher ranking | Result |
|---|---|
| Niche | #125 of 236 MA districts · B |
| SchoolDigger | #295 of 361 MA localities |
| U.S. News | #1 of 353 MA · Boston Latin School (exam school — admission by test, not address) |
| Boston Magazine | #44 of 148 · Boston Latin School |
| Official Massachusetts data (DESE) | Result |
|---|---|
| MCAS achievement | 22nd percentile statewide |
| Student growth (SGP) | 50th percentile |
| 4-year graduation rate | 81.3% |
| 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 South Boston on Niche · SchoolDigger · U.S. News · DESE district profiles
Available Private School Options
18 of the 150 private schools in South Boston 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 South Boston, 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 South Boston
What it takes to live here$2M 4BR · ≈$24,800 tax
| To buy | Median price (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4BR / 2BA detached house | $2M |
| 3BR / 2BA townhouse | $1.5M |
| 2BR condo | $850k |
| Property taxes (FY2026) | $12.40 per $1,000 (1.24%) |
These are modeled estimates, not listings. Each row opens the real Redfin market in ZIP 02127, and the two will not match.
| To rent | Per month (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4 bedrooms | $5,007/mo |
| 3 bedrooms | $4,537/mo |
| 2 bedrooms | $3,807/mo |
| 1 bedroom | $3,183/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 South Boston’s ZIP codes
Home values over the last decade
| If a $2.00M house grew at… | 5 yrs | 10 yrs | 15 yrs | 30 yrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.5% — South Boston’s own last decade | $2.38M | $2.82M | $3.35M | $5.61M |
| 3% — inflation, holding its real value | $2.32M | $2.69M | $3.12M | $4.85M |
These are not forecasts. They are what $2.00M 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 South Boston
urban
| What’s here | Count |
|---|---|
| Cafés and coffee shops | 11 |
| Bookshops | 0 |
Museums, theatres and galleriesSee the list | 1 |
| Colleges and universities | 0 |
| Public library | Boston Public Library branches |
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. Boston neighborhood figures are counted inside the neighborhood’s own boundary, not the city’s. These figures describe places, never the people in them — see our methodology.
Census snapshot
The American Community Survey reports these figures for cities and towns, not for Boston’s neighborhoods, so none are shown here.
Town spending & civic data
| Boston (citywide) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Residents | 675,647 |
| Municipal budget | $4.78B |
| School district spending | $2.04B |
| Spending per pupil | $33,854 |
| School spending per resident | $3,024 |
| Subsidized housing (Ch. 40B) | 21.54% |
These are Boston’s citywide figures, shared by every neighborhood.
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 South Boston
Surprisingly similar in character
Read next
Data statusPrices preliminary · data updated September 11, 2026
| Figure | Status |
|---|---|
| Home prices | Preliminary |
| Median value by bedroom count | Sourced |
| Property tax rate | Sourced |
| Census shares and homeownership | Sourced |
| Rents | Sourced |
| School data | Sourced |
| Commute | Measured + modeled |
This community was added after the original hundred, so its prices are preliminary estimates, not yet checked against sales. 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.
