A buyer touring Chevy Chase for the first time almost always asks the same question after the third open house: is this whole area one place, or did I just walk through three different neighborhoods that happen to share a name?
The honest answer is closer to twelve. Chevy Chase, Maryland is not a single municipality. It's a cluster of small incorporated towns and special tax districts, each with its own elected government, its own tax rate, and in some cases its own police department, sitting inside one Montgomery County zip code that gets reported to the market as if it were one thing. The median price a buyer sees on a search portal folds all of it together. The tax bill, the permit office, and even the trash pickup schedule do not.
Twelve Governments, One Zip Code
The area traces back to the Chevy Chase Land Company, which developed the land in numbered sections starting in the 1890s. Over the following decades, several of those sections incorporated as their own towns and villages rather than staying unincorporated parts of Montgomery County. What resulted is a set of adjoining, independently governed communities: the Town of Chevy Chase, Chevy Chase Village, Section 3, Section 5, Martin's Additions, Somerset, North Chevy Chase, Chevy Chase View, Friendship Heights, and the tiny special tax district of Drummond, among others.
These aren't nominal distinctions. Chevy Chase Village has its own elected Board of Managers, its own Village Manager, and its own police department. According to the Village's own government page, the Board sets the Village's real estate tax rate every year at its Annual Meeting in April. Section 5, just to the north, is home to roughly 223 houses and exactly one restaurant, the long-standing La Ferme on Brookville Road. Drummond, a special taxing district established in 1916, covers two-thirds of a single street and has just 43 homes, too small for the Census Bureau to publish separate population data. Somerset runs its own town pool. The Town of Chevy Chase, incorporated in 1918, offers residents twice-a-week backdoor garbage pickup and an organic recycling program through a private hauler, a service level a resident one street over in an unincorporated pocket simply doesn't get.
None of that shows up on a listing sheet. All of it shows up on a closing statement.
What Twelve Governments Cost You
Every property in Chevy Chase pays Maryland's state rate and Montgomery County's rate, the same way every homeowner in the county does. What changes block to block is the municipal add-on, and it is not a small variance. Section 3 levies its own municipal rate of roughly $0.10 per $100 of assessed value. The Town of Chevy Chase, one border over, has historically set its municipal rate around $0.0079 per $100, nearly thirteen times lower. Chevy Chase Village's own recent budget filings put its rate in the neighborhood of six to seven cents per $100, reset annually by the Board.
On a $1.5 million assessment, the gap between Section 3's municipal rate and the Town's alone works out to more than $1,300 a year, before either homeowner has paid a dollar of the county or state rate that applies equally to both. Two colonials on adjacent streets, similar size, similar era, can carry noticeably different annual tax bills purely because of which side of an old subdivision line they sit on.
Here's a rough sense of how the pieces stack, using recent municipal filings as a guide rather than a locked-in figure, since each town's Board resets its own rate every year:
| Jurisdiction | Approximate municipal rate (per $100 assessed) | Governing body |
|---|---|---|
| Unincorporated Chevy Chase | $0.00 | Montgomery County only |
| Town of Chevy Chase | ~$0.008 | Elected Town Council |
| Chevy Chase Village | ~$0.06–0.07 | Board of Managers |
| Section 3 | ~$0.10 | Village Council |
The county and state rates apply on top of every row in that table. The point isn't the exact cent figure, which the Village itself revisits every spring. The point is that the municipal layer is real money, it is set locally, and a search portal's single "Chevy Chase, MD" median has no way to show it to you.
If you want the fuller mechanics of how Maryland calculates the county rate, the Homestead Tax Credit, and assessment cycles, we've laid that out in more detail in our guide to how Maryland property taxes work in Chevy Chase. This piece is about the layer that guide doesn't cover on its own: which of the twelve governments you're actually buying into.
The Median Doesn't Know Which Government You're In
The tax patchwork isn't the only thing the aggregate number hides. It hides market direction, too.
Over the three months ending May 2026, the broader Chevy Chase, MD market posted a median sale price of $1.3 million, down 9.36 percent from the same period a year earlier, with price per square foot down 6.4 percent and homes taking an average of 19 days to sell compared with 7 days the year before. Read on its own, that looks like a market losing steam.
Chevy Chase Village, one of the twelve towns folded into that aggregate, told a different story over almost the same window. In the three months ending July 2026, the Village posted a median sale price of $1.8 million, down a smaller 6.5 percent year over year, while its price per square foot actually rose 4.6 percent. The Village's per-square-foot value was climbing at the same time the area-wide number was falling.
That's not a contradiction in the data. It's what happens when twelve separate micro-markets get averaged into one headline. A buyer who reads "Chevy Chase is cooling" and assumes that applies evenly to every one of those twelve towns is working from a number that was never built to answer that question. The market in Section 3 can be behaving differently from the market in the Village, which can be behaving differently again from the unincorporated pockets, and the aggregate figure smooths all three into a single trend line that describes none of them precisely.
The Permit Office Changes Too
For a family planning to renovate after closing, the twelve-government structure matters just as much on the construction side. Each municipality issues its own building permits and sets its own ordinances, and Village guidance to residents is explicit that anyone doing work in one of these communities should contact that specific town's officials first, because practices differ from one town hall to the next. Some of these jurisdictions run full-time offices with dedicated staff. Others operate part-time.
Even something as basic as sidewalk snow clearing splits along municipal lines. A recent Village budget document notes that neighboring towns including the Town of Chevy Chase, Section 5, Martin's Additions, and Somerset all provide some form of municipal sidewalk clearing, while Section 3 limits the service to residents on Medicare, and the Village itself was still weighing whether to add a fee-based version. None of this is dramatic on its own. All of it adds up to a simple fact: buying in Chevy Chase means buying into a specific town's way of running things, not a single unified system.
Reading a Listing With the Right Map
None of this means one of the twelve towns is better than another. It means the address on a listing sheet is doing more work than it looks like. A house priced comfortably below the area's reported median might sit in Section 3, carrying that town's higher municipal rate. A house at the top of the range might be in the Town of Chevy Chase, carrying a fraction of that add-on. The only way to know is to ask which municipality, specifically, the parcel sits in, and to check that town's current rate and permit process directly, since each one adjusts its own numbers annually.
That's a question worth asking before you fall in love with a house, not after the settlement sheet arrives.
A Few Questions Worth Settling Early
Is Chevy Chase, MD the same place as Chevy Chase, DC? No. Chevy Chase, DC sits inside the District, follows DC's tax structure and DC Public Schools, and isn't broken into separate incorporated towns the way the Maryland side is. Western Avenue marks the state line between the two.
How do I find out which of the twelve municipalities a specific house is in? The property's own tax record, available through the state's assessment database, will show whether a municipal levy applies and which town collects it. Your agent can also confirm it directly with the property address before you write an offer.
Do all twelve municipalities really run their own police departments? No, that level of service varies. Chevy Chase Village maintains its own police department. Other towns rely on Montgomery County police coverage. It's one more example of how much changes underneath a name that reads as one neighborhood on paper.
If you're comparing houses across Chevy Chase's twelve towns and want a clear read on what a specific address actually costs and how its municipality handles permits, Omnia Real Estate can walk you through it block by block. Schedule a personalized consultation and we'll help you see past the single median to the specific town you'd actually be buying into.
