A couple I worked with this spring had two houses pulled up side by side on their laptop. One sat a few blocks off Fall River Avenue in Seekonk. The other was a cape near the Barrington waterfront, priced almost identically. They had done their homework and built a spreadsheet comparing carrying costs, and the top line was the property tax rate. Seekonk's residential rate for fiscal year 2026 is $12.35 per $1,000 of assessed value. Barrington's 2026 rate is $16.31 per $1,000. On paper, Seekonk wins by nearly $4 per thousand, and on a $600,000 home that gap is real money, something close to $2,376 a year.

Except that spreadsheet only had one row for taxes. It should have had two.

The bill Rhode Island stopped sending

Rhode Island eliminated its municipal car tax. Not reduced it, not capped it. Eliminated it. Under state law, the motor vehicle and trailer excise tax was repealed effective July 1, 2022, and no city, town, or fire district has been allowed to levy it since fiscal year 2023. If you own a car and live in Barrington, or East Providence, or anywhere else in Rhode Island, you have not received a car tax bill in years and you are not going to.

Massachusetts never did this. Seekonk, along with every one of the state's 351 cities and towns, still charges an annual motor vehicle excise tax under state law: a flat $25 per $1,000 of a vehicle's value, set once by the legislature and identical everywhere, so no town can undercut its neighbor on this particular line item. The value isn't your car's market price or what you paid for it. It's a declining percentage of the manufacturer's original list price, stepped down over five years:

1. The year of manufacture, the car is valued at 90 percent of its original MSRP
2. The second year, that drops to 60 percent
3. The third year, 40 percent
4. The fourth year, 25 percent
5. The fifth year and every year after, it settles at a permanent 10 percent floor, for as long as you own the car

That floor never disappears. A fifteen-year-old sedan still generates a bill, just a small one. Depending on a vehicle's age and original sticker price, a typical Massachusetts household ends up somewhere between $75 and $675 a year per car. A two-car garage in Seekonk can easily produce a combined excise bill in the hundreds of dollars annually, sometimes more if the vehicles are newer.

Run that against the $2,376 gap our couple found in the property tax line, and the comparison stops being simple. It doesn't necessarily erase the Seekonk advantage. But it shrinks it, and for a household with two newer vehicles, it can shrink it by a lot more than most spreadsheets account for.

What this looked like when the law actually changed

The repeal wasn't quiet. Rhode Island had already been phasing the tax out under a six-year schedule, and lawmakers accelerated the final step by a year, wiping out the last car tax bill for hundreds of thousands of vehicles statewide. East Providence is a useful footnote here, because the city runs on a different fiscal year than the rest of the state and its phase-out schedule was actually a year behind everyone else's. City leadership pushed to catch East Providence residents up to the same accelerated timeline the rest of Rhode Island got, and by the time the dust settled, the city's own numbers showed roughly 3,300 additional vehicles came off the tax roll and the average bill dropped by close to half before disappearing entirely.

That detail matters if you're comparing more than two towns. Barrington has been fully car-tax-free since the statewide repeal took effect. East Providence got there on a slightly different calendar but arrived at the same place. Seekonk, being in Massachusetts, was never on that path to begin with, because the tax it charges isn't a Seekonk policy choice. It's state law, and no Seekonk town meeting can vote it away.

The property tax math, side by side

Here's how the two towns actually compare on a hypothetical $600,000 assessed home, before adding vehicles into the picture. Assessed value and market value aren't always the same number, so treat this as illustrative rather than a quote for your specific address.

That range on the Seekonk excise line is wide on purpose. A household driving two older, paid-off vehicles sitting near the 10 percent floor might see a combined bill closer to $150 or $200 a year. A household with two vehicles still in their first few years of ownership, at higher original MSRPs, could see a combined bill well into four figures. The property tax gap between the towns is fixed at roughly $2,376 on this hypothetical value. The car tax variable is not fixed at all, and that's exactly the point.

The income tax layer most people skip

Property and car taxes aren't the only numbers that shift when you cross the state line, and the direction of the shift depends heavily on income. Massachusetts uses a flat 5 percent rate on most income, with a 4 percent surtax that only applies to income above $1 million, adjusted annually for inflation, according to the Tax Foundation. Rhode Island uses graduated brackets that top out at 5.99 percent.

That structure produces a genuine crossover point. At a household income around $100,000, Rhode Island's brackets tend to land below Massachusetts's flat 5 percent, largely because of how the state's standard deduction and exemptions apply at that income level. Above roughly $175,000, the picture flips, and Massachusetts's flat rate becomes the lower one. Only households clearing that seven-figure surtax threshold see Massachusetts pull meaningfully ahead on the high end.

None of this is tax advice, and none of it should be the deciding factor in choosing a neighborhood. But if you're building a spreadsheet to compare Seekonk and an East Bay Rhode Island town, income level belongs in that spreadsheet right next to the tax rate, because the two states don't move in the same direction at every income band.

What this actually means if you're choosing between these towns

None of this settles the question of which town costs less to live in. What it does is correct a comparison that gets made constantly and rarely gets finished. The property tax rate is the number everyone quotes because it's the easiest one to find. The car excise structure and the income tax crossover are the numbers that actually determine whether that rate difference survives contact with a real household budget.

If you're cross-shopping Seekonk against Barrington or East Providence, the honest version of that spreadsheet has at least three rows, not one: the property tax on the specific home you're considering, the number and value of vehicles you'd be garaging in Massachusetts if you land in Seekonk, and where your household income sits relative to that rough $100,000 and $175,000 crossover range. Two households looking at the exact same pair of listings can land on genuinely different answers once all three rows are filled in.

A few common questions

Does the Massachusetts excise tax rate vary by town? No. The $25 per $1,000 rate and the five-year depreciation schedule are set by state law and apply identically in Seekonk and every other Massachusetts city or town. A town can't lower it, and a town can't raise it either.

Could Rhode Island bring the car tax back? As of 2026, there's no active proposal to reinstate it. The repeal was written into state law effective fiscal year 2023, and it applies to every Rhode Island municipality, not just a temporary reduction.

Does this mean Barrington is automatically the better financial choice? Not automatically. It means the property tax rate alone doesn't prove it. The right comparison depends on the specific home's assessed value, how many vehicles a household garages and how new they are, and where household income falls relative to the state income tax crossover point.

If you're trying to run these numbers against a specific pair of homes in Seekonk, Barrington, or East Providence, I'm happy to walk through it with you, town by town and line by line, until the comparison actually holds up. Dave Silva works across the East Bay and Bristol County every day, and getting this math right before you write an offer is a lot easier than untangling it after closing.