How Much Does the Moraga School Premium Really Add?

Almost every buyer we work with in Moraga asks some version of the same question: how much am I paying for the schools? The popular number — the one that floats around Nextdoor and relocation Facebook groups — is 15 to 20%. Our read of the last two years of closed sales is that the real number is about half of that.

We pulled 294 closed sales from January 2024 through December 2025 that fell inside the Moraga School District boundary, and matched each one against comparable homes sold in the same period within a mile of the boundary but outside the district — typically homes on the Lafayette, Canyon, or Rheem-side edges. We controlled for square footage, lot size, year built, condition, and view as best we could with a hedonic regression. The adjusted premium came out to 7.8%.

That's a meaningful number — on a $2M home that's $156,000 attributable to district boundary alone — but it is not the 15-to-20% number that some buyers have internalized. Several things explain the gap. First, the outside-boundary homes in our dataset are not bad homes in bad neighborhoods; many are on the Lafayette side of the line and carry their own strong elementary assignments. Second, Lamorinda as a whole has exceptionally strong schools, so the 'bad alternative' is actually a good alternative. Third, the premium concentrates at the high-school level more than the elementary level.

The sub-slices tell the real story. The premium at the elementary level (Camino Pablo, Donald Rheem, Los Perales) is about 5.4%. At the high-school level — attending Campolindo — the premium is closer to 9.1%. In other words, what buyers are really paying up for is four years of Campolindo, not six years of a specific Moraga elementary. That squares with what we hear in consultations; the question of where a kid will go to high school weighs on relocation decisions more heavily than the K-5 assignment.

For buyers: this is useful because many homes technically outside the Moraga district are an easy carpool to Campolindo-adjacent activities and sit in excellent feeder systems of their own. The premium is not worth paying just to be inside a line on a map if the comparable outside-line home is in a similar feeder pattern.

For sellers: price the premium honestly. Pricing a Moraga SD home 18% above a comparable just-outside-the-line sale does not match what the market is actually paying. Your listing agent pulling comps should be able to show you the adjusted premium in a 3-to-5-mile radius, not just repeat the neighborhood folklore.