Land · Connecticut tax sale guide

Connecticut tax sales by city and town

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Connecticut runs its tax sales one municipality at a time. There is no county sale and no state auction calendar: each of the state's cities and towns collects through its own tax collector, under one statute, section 12-157, but on its own schedule, in its own venue, and with its own bidder rules. Some of the cities in this hub sell the property itself at public auction, one sells its tax liens in bulk instead, and several publish no sale program at all, enforcing their liens through the courts or through constables serving tax warrants. The pages below track the ten largest Connecticut cities, the channel each one actually uses, and the most recent sale each city has officially published.

What never changes is the shape of the deal. The winning bid buys the whole property, the deed then sits unrecorded at the town clerk for six months while the owner can redeem by repaying your full purchase price with interest at 18 percent per year, and any bid amount above what the city is owed is escrowed for the former owner rather than kept as a windfall. Read the state frame first, then the city page for the collector's own rules on deposits, deadlines, and who is barred from bidding.

Verify before you go: a city or town can move a date, change terms, cancel a sale, or pull parcels at any time. The official sale list is the final word.

The 10 jurisdictions

Each row links to that jurisdiction's own page: selling office, venue or platform, deposit, payment terms, leftover channel, and sources. Where a jurisdiction has not posted a dated sale, the row says so instead of projecting a pattern onto it.

How Connecticut tax sales work

• Connecticut has no county tax sales. Each city or town tax collector sells under section 12-157, and the sale is entirely outside the courts.
• The tax lien attaches on October 1 of the assessment year before the tax comes due and takes precedence over other claims on the property (section 12-172).
• Unpaid installments accrue interest at 1.5 percent per month, 18 percent per year, from the due date, with each part month counted as a full month (section 12-146).
• After a formal demand (section 12-155), the collector levies a tax warrant and gives notice nine to twelve weeks before the sale: posted at the collector's office, filed in the land records, sent by certified mail to the owner and every lienholder of record, and published in a newspaper for three weeks.
• The property itself, all of it, is sold at public auction to the highest bidder. There is no fixed dollar minimum in the statute; a bid that does not cover the full amount due can be rejected and the property sold to the municipality instead, so cities publish the total amount due as the minimum bid.
• The winner pays the deposit the notice requires on sale day and the balance by the notice deadline. The collector signs the deed within two weeks, but it is held unrecorded at the town clerk's office for six months.
• The owner and lienholders then have six months to redeem, sixty days for abandoned property where a local ordinance so provides, by repaying the amount due at the sale plus interest at 18 percent per year on the total purchase price.
• Any amount bid above the taxes, interest, fees and costs is held in escrow, applied to the owner's other municipal debts, then paid to the Superior Court clerk, where the owner and lienholders have ninety days to apply for its return.
• If nobody redeems, the deed is recorded, title passes to the buyer, and any court challenge to the deed must be brought within one year of recording (section 12-159b).

Connecticut sells the property itself rather than a lien, and the deed is not recorded for six months, during which the owner can take the property back by repaying your entire purchase price plus interest at 18 percent per annum.

Research the parcels before you bid

A sale list gives you the parcel, the date, and the opening terms. It does not give you the owner, the value, or the rest of the picture: liens, foreclosure status, and parcel history. PropertyRadar is the data platform for that layer. It carries owner records, assessed and market values, foreclosure and tax data, and property history for parcels across the country, searchable by address, owner, or county, including parcels that never reach a sale list.

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Get the alert, not just the calendar.

The dates on these pages are the free layer. The Pine membership is the paid layer, proven in New York: members pick their counties, get alerts when a sale is scheduled or a list posts, and receive the full property list with the analysis already done. Connecticut jurisdictions open from the interest list first, in the order readers join it.

Keep going

Once a deadline puts you in a sale, the Land Investor Due Diligence Toolkit is the checklist and bid worksheet to run on each parcel before you bid.