Drive east on Vanderbilt Parkway past Half Hollow Hills High School East and Dix Hills looks like one hamlet. Same split-levels and center-hall colonials on quarter-acre lots, same wooded curb appeal, same 11746 on every mailbox. Cross Village Hill Drive in the northeast corner of the hamlet, though, and the school bus idling at the stop sign is headed somewhere different. It picks up for Commack, not Half Hollow Hills, even though the house behind it has a Dix Hills address just like the one three doors back.
That is not a rounding error. Half Hollow Hills Central School District #5 serves the vast majority of Dix Hills and Melville, along with all of Wheatley Heights and pieces of East Farmingdale, Deer Park, West Hills, and South Huntington. But a slice of Dix Hills, mostly in the southeast and northeast sections, sits inside the Commack Union Free School District instead. Two full campuses that carry the Commack name, Rolling Hills Elementary and Commack Middle School, are physically located within Dix Hills's borders. They are not exceptions or satellite programs. They are Commack schools, funded by a Commack budget, sitting on Dix Hills soil.
If you are comparing Dix Hills to another Western Suffolk hamlet right now, that split matters more than it sounds like it should, because none of the numbers you have already seen account for it.
Where the Line Actually Runs
Half Hollow Hills spans the towns of Huntington and Babylon and includes five elementary schools (Otsego, Paumanok, Signal Hill, Sunquam, and Vanderbilt), two middle schools (Candlewood and West Hollow), and two high schools, High School East on Vanderbilt Parkway and High School West on Wolf Hill Road. Commack's district lines cross Huntington and Smithtown, with Townline Road marking that town boundary, and its footprint reaches into Dix Hills and Hauppauge in addition to Commack proper.
The practical result is that a Dix Hills lot's zoning does not follow the hamlet's informal geography. It follows a parcel-level tax code drawn by the Town of Huntington's assessor, one that has nothing to do with the word printed on your mail. A buyer who assumes every Dix Hills listing feeds the same district because the sign in the yard says "Dix Hills" is working from an assumption the tax map does not support.
The Number Your Search Doesn't Split Out
When you pull up Dix Hills on a home search site, you get one blended figure. Over the three months ending in June 2026, homes in Dix Hills sold at a median of $1.4 million, moving in an average of 28 days. As of August 2026, the median list price was closer to $1.49 million, at roughly $463 per square foot.
Neither of those figures separates the Half Hollow Hills side from the Commack side. They cannot, because the underlying MLS data is organized by hamlet, not by school tax code. So the median you are anchoring your search to is an average of two different taxing jurisdictions, each with its own elected school board, its own annual budget vote, and its own levy, quietly folded into one number that looks like a single market.
That would be a curiosity if it stayed academic. It stops being academic the moment you are comparing two listings near the boundary and assuming they carry the same tax structure because they share a hamlet name.
Two Elected Boards, Two Levies, One Address Label
In May 2025, Commack voters adopted the district's 2025-26 budget, a total of $233,035,125, up 2.62 percent from the year before, with a tax levy of $159,259,962, an increase of 2.29 percent over the prior year's $155,698,830. Districts revote every spring, so the exact figures move year to year, but the structural point does not: that levy is raised from, and decided by, Commack district residents alone, a group that includes the Dix Hills households zoned into it and excludes every household zoned into Half Hollow Hills.
Half Hollow Hills runs its own separate budget process, with its own levy, voted on by its own residents, funding its own set of schools. The two districts do not share a treasury, a board, or a levy calculation. They share a hamlet's informal name and, in a specific pocket near Village Hill Drive and along the Commack border, they share physical proximity down to a few streets.
The Town of Huntington's own tax billing system reflects how many layers already stack on a single Dix Hills parcel before school taxes even enter the picture. The town groups multiple special districts, fire protection, water, and others, under combined codes on a single bill. School taxes are a separate line within that bill, and which school levy shows up on that line depends on the parcel's actual assigned code, something the Town of Huntington's assessor's office can confirm directly, not something a hamlet name settles for you.
| Half Hollow Hills CSD #5 | Commack UFSD | |
|---|---|---|
| Towns it spans | Huntington and Babylon | Huntington and Smithtown |
| Schools physically located in Dix Hills | Otsego, Paumanok, Signal Hill, Sunquam, and Vanderbilt elementaries; Candlewood and West Hollow middle schools; High School East and High School West | Rolling Hills Elementary; Commack Middle School |
| Governance | Separately elected board, separate annual levy vote | Separately elected board, separate annual levy vote |
What This Means If You're Comparing Dix Hills to Somewhere Else
Before you let a median price anchor a decision, find out which district a specific listing actually sits in. That means asking for the seller's current tax bill, not a hamlet-wide estimate, and confirming the parcel's school tax code with the Town of Huntington rather than assuming it from the mailing address. If you are working with an agent pulling comparable sales for a listing near Village Hill Drive or the Commack line, ask whether those comps are filtered by taxing district or just by zip code. A comp set that blends both sides will understate or overstate what a specific house should carry.
This is the kind of discrepancy that tends to surface during attorney review or title search, well after a buyer has already fallen for a house and built a number around it. Catching it earlier, before an offer goes in, is simply a matter of asking the right question at the right stage rather than trusting the label on the listing.
What This Means If You Already Own on the Commack Side
If your Dix Hills home is one of the ones zoned to Commack, your comp set deserves the same scrutiny in reverse. An automated valuation or a quick pull of "Dix Hills sales" can just as easily mix in Half Hollow Hills-side properties that carry a different tax structure than yours. Getting ahead of that question during listing preparation, rather than fielding it for the first time from a buyer's attorney, keeps pricing conversations from turning into last-minute renegotiations.
A Few Questions Before You Compare
How do I find out which district my specific address is zoned for? Not from the mailing address. The Town of Huntington's assessor's office can confirm the parcel's tax code directly, and each district's registration office can confirm school zoning for that same address.
Does this affect my tax bill even if I don't have kids in school? Yes. School taxes make up the largest share of a typical Long Island property tax bill regardless of whether a household has children enrolled, so the district a parcel falls into affects the bill either way.
Is Dix Hills unusual for having a split like this? Not entirely. Half Hollow Hills itself reaches into pieces of Wheatley Heights, East Farmingdale, Deer Park, South Huntington, and West Hills, so boundary overlap is common across Western Suffolk. What makes Dix Hills a clear example is that two full Commack campuses, not just a boundary line on a map, sit physically inside the hamlet.
Boundary questions like this one are exactly why a hamlet-wide median is a starting point, not an answer. If you're comparing Dix Hills to another Western Suffolk community, or trying to figure out what a specific address actually carries in taxes and zoning before you write an offer, the Robyn Schatz team can walk the parcel-level details with you. Get Your Free Home Valuation and start with the numbers that actually apply to your address, not the hamlet's.
