Living in Duxbury, MA

Plymouth County

Duxbury is a South Shore harbor town on Duxbury Bay, settled around 1628 by Pilgrim colonists including Myles Standish, William Brewster, and John Alden, and incorporated in 1637 as the second town in Plymouth Colony -- a real, documented founding identity distinct from, though connected to, neighboring Plymouth's own larger Pilgrim-tourism identity already covered at Tier A in this dataset. Duxbury's economy ran from early farming and fishing through a substantial 19th-century shipbuilding industry (at least 180 vessels built across roughly 20 local shipyards) into its current, real, and widely documented identity as one of Massachusetts's most affluent, picturesque residential harbor towns -- a transition that began as Boston-area buyers purchased Duxbury's waterfront land for summer homes in the late 19th century and has continued into a primarily year-round, high-value residential community today. Duxbury's 2026 average home value ran $1,131,969 per Zillow (up 5.1% year-over-year), genuinely, substantially above both the Massachusetts statewide average ($667,265) and the national median. On tax, Duxbury's picture is genuinely favorable relative to its home values: effective property tax rate figures across sources reviewed this pass ran 1.01%-1.14%, with a roughly mid-range 1.07% figure landing below the Massachusetts statewide median (1.15%) despite Duxbury's very high home values -- the same rate-vs-bill dynamic massachusetts.js discloses at the state level, where high-value coastal towns can carry comparatively moderate rates. This record also discloses, honestly, Duxbury's real, current, and directly documented coastal-storm risk: a 2023 town-commissioned engineering study identifies Duxbury's particular susceptibility to prolonged flooding from multi-day nor'easters, and recent storms have broken open sections of Duxbury Beach's roughly 65-year-old seawall, flooding some areas under several feet of water and damaging dozens of nearby homes -- a genuinely different coastal-hazard emphasis from Orleans's erosion-dominant risk, closer in kind to Provincetown's storm-surge exposure, but centered specifically on Duxbury's own barrier-beach and aging seawall infrastructure.

Explore Duxbury in depth

• Cost of Living & Housing in Duxbury
• Moving to Duxbury: Pros, Cons & What to Know

Housing

Taxes

The tradeoffs

Who this fits

Best for: Best fits families and luxury/beach-focused buyers specifically drawn to Duxbury's real, affluent harbor-town character and its documented Pilgrim-era and shipbuilding heritage, who have budgeted directly for its very high home values and separately confirmed current flood-zone and seawall-condition status for any property near Duxbury Beach.

Maybe not for you if: Probably not the right fit for anyone requiring genuine housing affordability, anyone seeking public transit access or a denser urban setting, or anyone highly averse to real, currently documented nor'easter storm-surge and seawall-failure risk at Duxbury Beach specifically -- confirm current FEMA flood-zone status and the town's latest seawall-condition reporting directly.