Oswego

First, where Oswego is. It sits mostly in Kendall County, with a piece of the village in Will County. It is not DuPage, and I want to say that clearly because the two get mixed up online all the time. Different county, different clerk, different tax bills, different everything. Downtown Oswego sits on the Fox River southwest of Chicago, right where Route 34 crosses. Kendall County had the highest population growth rate in Illinois in the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's numbers, and Oswego is the biggest piece of it, at 39,948 people as of the Census Bureau's July 2025 estimate.

Here is what I see in the sale records. I use a three-year rolling median, which just means I take three years of sales at a time and find the middle one, so a few odd sales cannot yank the number around. In Oswego it went $255K in 2018, $252K in 2019, $258K in 2020, $275K in 2021, $300K in 2022, $321K in 2023, $360K in 2024, and $400K in 2025. That is up 57% since 2018, and it rests on 1,990 sales in the 2023 through 2025 window. That is a thick sample. The source is the Illinois Department of Revenue MyDec transfer declarations on the state open data portal. I kept only arms-length sales, which means normal deals between strangers: single parcel, over $10,000, with foreclosures, bank-owned resales, family transfers and court-ordered sales removed.

Three things you should know about that number before you lean on it. One, the series starts in 2018 and not 2013 like my Chicago neighborhood pages. Illinois only began collecting these records electronically outside Cook County around then. That is where the record begins. Two, it covers all homes together: houses, condos, townhomes and duplexes. Outside Cook County the state publishes no class that separates a house from a condo from a duplex, so I cannot split them apart. A duplex is what people in Chicago call a two-flat, meaning one building with two homes in it. Three, this figure comes from every sale filed under an Oswego address, and Oswego straddles Kendall and Will counties, so it is not one county's number. Underneath the $400K there is a very wide range. Oswego has 1990s subdivisions, 2000s subdivisions, brand new construction off Wolf's Crossing, and old houses within a few blocks of the river downtown. Those are four different price worlds. The subdivision is the purchase. The median is just a starting place.

About the train, and about how people actually get to work. Oswego has no Metra station. What it has is the Aurora Transportation Center, roughly ten miles north, which is the end of the line for Metra's BNSF, the busiest commuter line in the system, with 1,631 parking spaces and a ride into Chicago Union Station that runs roughly 50 to 70 minutes depending on the train. So the Oswego commute is drive-to-the-train, or drive the whole way on I-88 and Route 30 and Route 34. That is what everybody out here does and it works. There is also a long-running effort to bring rail closer. Metra's Kendall Extension Study looked at stations in Montgomery, Oswego, Yorkville, Plano and Sandwich, priced construction at $400 to $700 million, and is now sitting with local officials while they figure out funding. Officials are also looking at a cheaper route using the freight line that already runs through downtown Oswego. Nothing is built and nothing is funded, so buy the house for the house, not for a future station. If a station does come, you got it for free.

Rents in Oswego need a careful eye. RentCafe reports $2,290 for a two bedroom and $3,254 for a three bedroom as of August 2, 2026, up 8.78% over the year before. But their sample is only apartment buildings with 50 or more units, and Oswego is overwhelmingly a town of houses. The Census puts homeownership here at 87.9%, meaning fewer than one in eight homes is a rental at all. So that RentCafe figure is drawn from a small slice of a small market and I would not underwrite a purchase on it. Use HUD Fair Market Rent as your steadier benchmark. That is the federal government's estimate of what a decent standard unit rents for. For FY2026, Kendall County is its own HUD area, at $2,050 for a two bedroom and $2,819 for a three bedroom. The Census median gross rent across all sizes in Oswego is $1,860 for 2020 to 2024. One more real data point: when Shodeen opened The Reserve at Hudson Crossing downtown, 280 apartments over shops on the river, published rents ran $1,090 to $2,290. That thin rental supply is a fact worth knowing in both directions. It makes comparables harder to find, and it also means very little competition for the landlord who owns one.

Taxes. The Kendall County Clerk publishes rates by tax code, and for the 2024 tax year the codes covering the Village of Oswego and School District 308 in Oswego Township run 7.60567 to 7.98613. That number looks enormous and it is not what you think. Illinois does not tax your full market value. State law says property outside Cook County is valued at "33 1/3% of its fair cash value," so the taxable number is about one third of what the home is worth, and the rate is charged per $100 of that smaller figure. On a $400,000 house that is roughly $133,000 in assessed value, and a rate around 7.8 per $100 lands near $10,400 a year before exemptions come off. Owner exemptions reduce it. Oswego covers several tax codes and part of the village is in Will County, which I did not read, so look up the actual rate on the actual parcel with the County Clerk before you build it into your budget. It is free and it takes a couple of minutes.

What Oswego is actually like. It is a growing town that has been spending money on the things growing towns need. Kids go to Oswego Community Unit School District 308, 23 schools and about 16,766 students, with two high schools, Oswego High and Oswego East. The Village is widening Wolf's Crossing into a four-lane road with roundabouts across 4.5 miles, and roughly half the $10.2 million first segment came from federal and state grants rather than new local taxes. Oswego, Montgomery and Yorkville are together building a 30-mile pipeline to bring Lake Michigan water in through the DuPage Water Commission by 2028, because the aquifer they use now is drawing down faster than it refills. That is a real project with a real bill attached, funded by grants, low-interest federal loans, a real estate transfer tax and phased water rate increases of about 4.5% to 6% a year through 2031. Worth knowing before you buy so you are not surprised by your water bill. On the fun side: Route 34 is a serious retail corridor at more than 2.2 million square feet, with Target, Meijer, Home Depot, Kohl's, Best Buy, Dick's and Walmart, and new stores keep opening. Downtown Oswego is small and walkable on the river, with Hudson Crossing Park, independent restaurants, and Venue 1012, an outdoor music venue the Village itself runs.