Look up home prices in Yardley, Pennsylvania this month and you'll land on at least three numbers that don't agree with each other. One source puts the median sale price over the three months ending in May 2026 at $402,000, down nearly 15 percent from the same period a year earlier. Another shows homes selling for a median of $695,000 in June 2026, with active listings priced around $780,000 as of September. A third tracks an average home value just over $704,000, up about 4 percent year over year. These aren't typos, and they aren't three snapshots of a market in free fall and recovery within the same quarter. They're measuring two different places that happen to share a mailing address.
The Borough Isn't the ZIP Code
Yardley Borough is a small, walkable town along the Delaware River, under one square mile, with a population of about 2,600 as of the 2020 census. It seceded from Lower Makefield Township in 1895, when the village then known as Yardleyville became its own municipality. It's the part of town with Main Street shops, the Delaware Canal towpath running behind backyards, and homes that in some cases trace their footprint back to the early 1800s.
Lower Makefield Township is a different scale of place entirely. It covers roughly 18.3 square miles and had a population around 32,500 at the 2010 census, with current township figures putting it closer to 33,000. It surrounds the borough on three sides and includes subdivisions, a public golf course, and its own stretch of canal path, but it isn't the same town in any legal or governmental sense. It has its own tax rate, its own trash contract, its own zoning board.
Here's the part that trips up anyone comparing prices across towns. The U.S. Postal Service assigns the same ZIP code, 19067, to Yardley Borough, most of Lower Makefield Township, and slices of Morrisville Borough and Falls Township. The ZIP code was built around Morrisville's post office decades ago and never redrawn to match municipal lines. So when a listing says "Yardley, PA," it might sit inside the historic borough, or it might sit three miles away in a Lower Makefield subdivision that has never touched the borough limits.
What Each Number Is Likely Counting
Real estate sites build their market pages by pulling MLS listings tagged with a given city name or ZIP. Depending on how a given source draws that boundary, "Yardley" means very different inventories.
| Source and Window | Reported Figure | Likely Scope |
|---|---|---|
| 3 months ending May 2026 | $402,000 median sale price, down 14.9% year over year, 16 sales in May | A small, borough-scale sample where a handful of transactions can swing the median sharply |
| June 2026 sold data | $695,000 median sale price, 13 days on market, 106 homes sold | A much larger sample, consistent with pulling in Lower Makefield Township's greater inventory |
| September 2026 active listings | $780,000 median list price, $295 per square foot | Current asking prices across the same broader 19067 footprint |
| Home Value Index, updated July 2026 | $704,217 average estimated value, up 4.1% year over year | An estimated-value model spanning the ZIP code, not a sales-only figure |
The $402,000 figure comes from a monthly sales count in the teens, which is exactly the kind of sample size where one or two lower-priced sales can pull a median down double digits in a single quarter. The figures north of $690,000 line up with a much larger pool of sales, the kind you'd expect if the undercount includes Lower Makefield's newer, larger-footprint subdivisions rather than just borough transactions. None of these sources publish their exact boundary methodology, so this is an inference, not a confirmed technical detail. But the geography behind it is verifiable, and it's the only explanation that accounts for medians nearly $300,000 apart in the same calendar year.
Two Very Different Yardleys on the Ground
Inside the borough, the housing stock reads like a small river town. Canal-front homes back directly onto the Delaware Canal towpath, some dating to the 1800s, with details like wide-plank floors and wood-burning stoves showing up in current listings. Walk a few blocks and you're at the SEPTA West Trenton Line train station, with an easy commute into Philadelphia, or at the shops and restaurants along Main Street. Buyers here are often paying for walkability and canal frontage on a small lot, not square footage.
Cross into Lower Makefield and the housing stock shifts. Yardley Commons is a garden-style condo community near the train station, with an HOA covering water, sewer, lawn care, and a shared pool. Hidden Oaks and similar neighborhoods offer brick-front colonials on larger, landscaped lots. Some subdivisions back directly onto Makefield Highlands, the township's public golf course. These are larger homes on larger parcels, built mostly in later decades, and they carry a different price profile than a 19th-century canal-front cottage three miles away.
Both areas share the Yardley mailing address. Only one of them is the actual Borough of Yardley.
Why This Matters When You're Comparing Towns
If you're weighing Yardley against New Hope, Doylestown, or another Bucks County town using a portal's median price, you need to know which Yardley that number reflects before the comparison means anything. A median built from borough-only sales is describing a market of walkable, canal-adjacent homes with a genuinely small transaction count each month. A median built from the full 19067 footprint is describing a much larger suburban township with a golf course, larger lots, and a completely different inventory mix.
This isn't a reason to distrust the numbers. It's a reason to ask what they're built from before treating them as apples-to-apples with a town whose ZIP code and municipal boundary happen to line up more cleanly.
A few ways to check which Yardley a specific listing actually sits in:
- Pull the tax parcel or property record and look at the municipality field. It will read "Yardley Boro" or "Lower Makefield Twp," not just the mailing city.
- Ask whether the address falls inside the borough's roughly one-square-mile footprint or somewhere in the township's much larger area.
- If walkability to Main Street or canal frontage matters to you, confirm the parcel is inside borough limits. A "Yardley, PA" address alone doesn't guarantee it.
A Couple of Things Worth Asking Before You Compare Numbers
Is Yardley Borough part of the same school district as the rest of the ZIP code? Not entirely. The borough and most of Lower Makefield Township feed into Pennsbury School District, but the Morrisville-addressed slice of the same 19067 ZIP falls under Morrisville Borough School District, a separate system.
Does the canal towpath run through both the borough and the township? Yes. The Delaware Canal towpath follows the river through Yardley Borough and continues along the water into Lower Makefield Township, so canal access isn't limited to one side of the municipal line, even though the housing stock along it varies.
If you're trying to make sense of what a "Yardley" listing actually gets you, or how it stacks up against a home in New Hope or Doylestown, Nick Esser can walk through the specific parcel, its municipality, and what that means for your comparison.
