Which municipality, and which school district
Horsham is a home-rule township — a charter adopted in 1975 and effective from January 1976, council-manager government, five council members elected at large to four-year terms, and outside the Pennsylvania Township Code entirely. Incorporated 1717, 17.32 square miles, 26,564 people.
Schools are Hatboro-Horsham, which covers Horsham Township and Hatboro Borough and nothing else.
The mailing address is a different animal. Comparing township boundaries against Census 2020 geography, only about 51% of Horsham’s land area lies in ZIP 19044; roughly 35% carries an Ambler 19002 address and 8% a Hatboro 19040 one. Those are area shares, so read them as estimates. And for all the school district they share, Horsham Township and Hatboro Borough do not touch — a strip of Upper Moreland and Warminster runs between them.
The tax bill that follows
Assessments here are 1996 base-year values. The Common Level Ratio factor for documents accepted between July 2026 and June 2027 is 3.36, so assessed value is roughly market price divided by 3.36.
Horsham’s 2026 total is 44.837 mills: county 5.462 plus 0.490 for the community college, township 2.725, and Hatboro-Horsham 36.160 for 2026–27. The township rate is the lowest around here, which is what a large commercial tax base buys.
Now the sharp illustration. Hatboro Borough pays the identical 36.160 school mills and a municipal rate of 13.125, for 55.237 total. That is 10.400 mills between two municipalities in one school district — $1,040 a year per $100,000 of assessed value, about $164 a month at the township’s cited average assessment of $188,836.
At 44.837 mills that average assessment produces a bill near $8,467, about $706 a month of escrow before insurance, four fifths of it school tax. That is arithmetic from published figures, so call it an estimate — and $188,836 against a typical Horsham-area value near $446,000 is a ratio above 42%, where the county-wide ratio is about 30%. Appeals are due 1 August.
On price, watch which series you are reading; all of them are ZIP figures. Redfin’s median sale for 19044 in July 2026 was $420,000, on 47 sales and 14 days on market. Zillow’s typical-value index for the same ZIP and month was $446,322. A widely-syndicated $739,900 figure for that month is unusable and is not repeated here.
Transfer tax is 2.000% at every Montgomery County address. Earned income tax is 1.0%, half township and half district, and there is no township trash fee — households hire a hauler themselves.
The houses
Census counts 10,079 units, median year built 1980. The 1980s is the biggest single decade at 25.8% of everything; 50.3% predates 1980 and 4.4% predates 1940. By type: 55.0% single-family detached, 20.3% attached or townhouse, the rest in multi-unit buildings.
One line in that table matters more than the rest. Of 9,857 occupied units, 1,704 — 17.3% — heat with fuel oil or kerosene. That is a real tank population, above ground and below.
What is genuinely new is small: 274 apartments on Dresher Road, broken ground 6 May 2026, and 57 homes on the Heffernan tract off Park Road. Neither is on the former base, which deserves stating flatly because it gets described as though bulldozers were running. As of the Navy’s restoration advisory board of 16 July 2026, about 850 acres remain Navy-owned and no acreage of the main base has transferred to the redevelopment authority; the finding of suitability for early transfer is still a draft that has not gone out for public comment. The August 2025 conveyance agreement covers a first tranche the Navy puts at 118 acres and the redevelopment authority at about 100. Horsham adopted the rezoning on 12 November 2025 and the plan runs to 1,416 homes plus 70 supportive units over 20 to 30 years. What exists today is zoning and agreements.
What a lender will ask about here
Water — whether the house is on public water or a private well, and what is known about it.
The former naval air station has been on the Superfund National Priorities List since 1995, originally for solvents, before PFAS was a word anyone here used. The PFAS came from firefighting foam used at the base and at the Air National Guard station. From the Navy’s July 2026 briefing: over 600 private wells sampled, over 460 already connected to municipal water at Navy expense, 120 of those for exceeding three times the federal limits, four more awaiting connection. The Navy has put over $25 million into the Horsham Water and Sewer Authority.
The federal limits stand today. EPA’s rule, effective 25 June 2024, sets 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, 10 ppt for PFHxS, PFNA and HFPO-DA, and a hazard index of 1 for mixtures. Two EPA proposals from May 2026 would rescind some limits and allow a 2031 compliance date on request; neither is final, so the 2024 numbers are in force.
The authority’s own record is worth asking for in writing. Its 2025 consumer confidence report shows treated water non-detect at every entry point except one 3.6 ppt PFOA maximum at Well 19 — against raw averages of 417 ppt PFOS at Well 26 and 389 at Well 40. Parts of the township are on Aqua Pennsylvania instead, and a Horsham property can sit on a private well and public sewer at once.
So the question is per parcel. If it is a well, ask whether it was sampled in the EPA program, what came back, whether the property was connected or treated, and who maintains it. Pennsylvania’s seller disclosure at 49 Pa. Code § 35.335a asks the water source, the date of the last test and the result, plus tanks and hazardous substances — but it asks what the seller knows, and no Pennsylvania rule requires testing a well before sale. That gap is why to ask early.
Next town over
Ambler shares this township’s ZIP across a third of its land and none of its school district. Willow Grove is over the Upper Moreland line, where the water utility changes.
What to do next
Call with the address, and say whether it is public water or a well — that one answer shapes the next month. A licensed Pennsylvania mortgage lender calls you back, usually the same working day and by the end of the next working day at the outside. Typing suits some people better. Send it along and it lands in the same queue. In Horsham the paperwork about a well is often already sitting in a file somebody else has read.