What Property Taxes Actually Run by Fort Washington Neighborhood (Part 21 of 30: The Fort Washington Files)
This is Part 21 of The Fort Washington Files from Donnell Williams Jr. and DMV Prime Properties, a thirty-part series built entirely on what 689 Fort Washington listings actually did in 2026.
Buyers moving into this zip code almost always ask the same question in the same order. What does a house cost, and then, right after, what do the taxes run. The first number is easy to find. The second one usually comes back as a single county-wide average that has very little to do with the house anybody is actually looking at.
Donnell's Bright MLS export, covering 689 Fort Washington listings tracked through September 17, 2026, carries the annual property tax figure on every closed sale. Across all 361 closings, the median came in at $5,485 a year. Underneath that median, the range runs from $2,830 to $9,411 depending on which subdivision a buyer lands in.
Start with the median and put it on a monthly basis
The $5,485 median is an annual figure, and almost nobody experiences property tax annually. Most buyers in Fort Washington see it as a line inside an escrow payment.
Divided by twelve, $5,485 works out to about $457 a month. That is what the middle of this market carried in 2026, on top of principal, interest and whatever insurance costs on the specific property.
For context, the median Fort Washington closing in that same export was $470,000. So the median tax line and the median sale price belong to the same middle of the same market, which makes $457 a month the honest starting point for a buyer running a budget here.
The high end of the range
The highest median tax figures in the closed subdivision data cluster in a handful of pockets. Each line below gives the number of 2026 closings, the median sale price, the median above-grade square footage and the median annual property tax:
- Tantallon North: 5 closings, $730,000, 3,330 square feet, $9,411
- Tantallon on the Potomac: 25 closings, $605,000, 2,522 square feet, $7,043
- Tantallon Hills: 7 closings, $560,000, 2,368 square feet, $6,963
- Aragona Village: 13 closings, $600,000, 2,386 square feet, $6,892
- Fort Washington Estates: 5 closings, $525,000, 1,986 square feet, $6,374
- Indian Queen East: 5 closings, $450,000, 1,392 square feet, $6,028
On a monthly basis, the Tantallon North median of $9,411 is roughly $784. Tantallon on the Potomac at $7,043 is roughly $587. Tantallon Hills at $6,963 is roughly $580, and Aragona Village at $6,892 is roughly $574.
Indian Queen East is the line worth pausing on. Its median sale price of $450,000 is below the zip code median of $470,000, and its median above-grade square footage of 1,392 is well under the zip code's 1,716. Its median tax of $6,028 still came in above the zip code median. Sale price alone does not predict the bill.
The low end of the range
At the other end of the same column, three subdivisions carried medians well below $5,485:
- Devon Hills Condo: 7 closings, $239,900, 1,144 square feet, $2,830
- Pinewood Hill: 7 closings, $350,000, 1,969 square feet, $3,387
- Prophecy: 7 closings, $350,000, 1,376 square feet, $4,015
Devon Hills Condo at $2,830 a year is about $236 a month. Pinewood Hill at $3,387 is about $282, and Prophecy at $4,015 is about $335.
Pinewood Hill is its own interesting case. At a median of 1,969 above-grade square feet it was larger than the zip code median home, yet its median tax landed second lowest in the data at $3,387. It also carried the lowest price per square foot in the export at $190 on sale price, which Part 17 of this series covered in detail.
What the spread does to a monthly payment
The distance between the top and the bottom of that range is not a rounding difference. Tantallon North's $9,411 median against Devon Hills Condo's $2,830 median is a gap of $6,581 a year.
Converted to monthly, that is roughly $784 against roughly $236, a difference of about $548 a month in the tax line alone. Two buyers with identical loan amounts and identical rates can be carrying very different monthly payments in the same zip code because of that one line.
That is the practical reason this post exists. A buyer who shops on sale price and assumes the tax line is fixed across Fort Washington is going to get a surprise somewhere, and the surprise usually arrives at the loan estimate rather than at the showing.
The middle of the range, where most of this market lives
Most Fort Washington subdivisions in the export landed within a few hundred dollars of the zip code median. The closings with no subdivision listed, 21 of them, carried a median tax of $5,495. Tantallon South came in at $5,497 across 7 closings, Maplewood at $5,518 across 5, Forest Knolls at $5,584 across 6, Tantallon Square at $5,632 across 7, South Fort Foote Village at $5,832 across 6 and River Bend at $5,850 across 6.
Slightly below the median sat Stonegate at $5,219 across 7 closings, Piscataway Estates at $5,410 across 8, Rose Valley Estates at $5,373 across 11, Fort Washington Forest at $4,725 across 6, Apple Grove at $4,689 across 9, Fort Washington at $4,662 across 10, Murray Hill at $4,638 across 5, Oaklawn at $4,593 across 5 and Rosedale Estates at $4,266 across 8.
Read that list next to the sale prices and one thing stands out. The tax medians track home size and assessment more closely than they track the sale price a buyer negotiates. Murray Hill closed at a $430,000 median with the highest price per square foot in the export at $355, and still carried a below-median tax figure of $4,638 on a median 1,241 square feet.
Two closings at similar prices, two different bills
The cleanest way to see this is to put three subdivisions with similar median sale prices side by side.
Rose Valley Estates closed 11 sales at a median of $440,000 on a median 1,274 above-grade square feet, with a median annual tax of $5,373. Indian Queen East closed 5 sales at a median of $450,000 on a median 1,392 square feet, with a median annual tax of $6,028. Stonegate closed 7 sales at a median of $495,000 on a median 1,404 square feet, with a median annual tax of $5,219.
Stonegate carried the highest median sale price of those three and the lowest median tax bill. Indian Queen East carried the middle sale price and the highest tax bill, about $655 a year more than Rose Valley Estates and about $809 more than Stonegate, which is roughly $55 and $67 a month.
These are small samples, five to eleven closings each, and every figure is a one-year median. They are not predictions about what any individual house will be assessed. They are a reason to look up the actual recorded figure on the actual address rather than assuming the neighborhood next door runs the same.
Gallahan Estates is the one line to skip
Gallahan Estates shows up in the closed subdivision table with 7 sales, a median of $835,235 and a median of one day on market. It is the one subdivision where the tax column is not meaningful.
Those were new construction closings, and new construction assessments do not reflect a finished, fully assessed property the way a resale does. Any buyer looking at recorded taxes on a newly built home in Fort Washington should treat the current figure as a placeholder and ask the county directly what the property will be assessed at once it is fully on the rolls.
Only 9 of the 361 closed sales in the export were new construction at all, 7 of them in Gallahan Estates, 1 in Spring Ridge and 1 in Tantallon on the Potomac, at a median of $835,235, a median of 7 days on market and a range of $710,000 to $1,500,000. Fort Washington is overwhelmingly a resale market, and resale is where these tax medians come from.
The Homestead Tax Credit and why it matters after closing
Maryland's Homestead Tax Credit caps how much the taxable assessed value on an owner-occupied home can rise in a single year. Per the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation's published County and Municipal Homestead Credit Percentages table effective July 1, 2024, the State of Maryland cap is 10 percent, the Prince George's County cap is 3 percent and the Charles County cap is 7 percent.
Two things about that credit catch new owners off guard. It is not automatic, and it takes a one-time application to SDAT. An owner who never files does not get it.
Readers should confirm the current Prince George's County figure directly with SDAT before relying on it, because the county's own finance page describes the credit differently than the SDAT table does. SDAT can be reached at sdat.homestead@maryland.gov, at 1-866-650-8783, or at 410-767-2165 in the Baltimore area.
One more line that is not a tax
Buyers in Prince George's County will also run into the front foot benefit charge, which WSSC Water administers in its Prince George's service area. It is not a property tax. It repays the cost of running water and sewer lines to the lot, it is billed annually for a defined term and it attaches to the property rather than the owner.
Maryland requires disclosure of private deferred water and sewer assessments on residential transfers, including the amount and the remaining term. The amount and the term vary by property, so the only right answer is the one on the disclosure for the specific house.
Donnell is a broker rather than a tax advisor, attorney or lender. Every figure in this post comes from recorded tax data on closed sales, which reflects those specific properties and their assessments at the time they sold. Any buyer or owner relying on an assessment, a credit or a deferred charge should confirm the details with SDAT, the Prince George's County Office of Finance, WSSC Water or a qualified tax professional.
Get the tax line before you get attached to the house
The tax number on a Fort Washington home is knowable before an offer is written, and it belongs in the budget conversation at the same moment as the price. Donnell Williams Jr. is the broker-owner of DMV Prime Properties at 12815 Old Fort Road in Fort Washington, and he pulls the recorded tax figure, the subdivision comparables and the assessment history on every home his buyers tour, because a $548 monthly swing between two pockets of the same zip code is not a detail. Buyers and anyone relocating into 20744 can reach him at 301.818.0313 or donnell@dmvprimerealty.com to get those numbers on a specific address before the loan estimate does it for them.
Part 22 of The Fort Washington Files builds the median Fort Washington home from the ground up and shows exactly what $470,000 bought in this zip code in 2026.
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