Delafield, WI

Delafield dates to 1837. Wikipedia's city entry says the settlement was named for Dr. Charles Delafield of Milwaukee and grew along the Bark River, which runs out of Nagawicka Lake through the middle of town. The settlement and the surrounding town shared a name and a government for more than a century. The city's own history note says the City of Delafield split from the Town of Delafield and incorporated in 1959.

That split is the first thing to understand about buying here. The City of Delafield and the Town of Delafield are separate municipalities with separate budgets, separate tax rates, separate police and different sewer arrangements, even though they share a ZIP code and a name. This guide covers the city. The town, which holds the western end of Pewaukee Lake and the Lapham Peak area, has its own guide at Town of Delafield.

The city's best-known history is military. Wikipedia notes that Delafield was the hometown of the Cushing brothers, three Union officers in the Civil War, among them Alonzo Cushing, who was killed at Gettysburg during Pickett's Charge. Cushing Memorial Park and Cushing Elementary are named for the brothers.

The lake era came early too. The Commodore, the restaurant that reopened on the Nagawicka shore in 2024, sits in a building that opened in the early 1900s as the Pleasant View Hotel and Resort and has changed hands more than 15 times since, according to BizTimes (July 2024). The downtown look you see today is deliberate: the city's design rules, covered below, ask new commercial buildings to follow the Colonial, Federal, Victorian and Greek Revival styles found in the area when the city incorporated.

Delafield sits on I-94 about 27 driving miles west of downtown Milwaukee, between Pewaukee to the east and Oconomowoc to the west. Wikipedia puts the city at 11.06 square miles, of which 1.65 square miles is water. Nearly all of that water is Nagawicka Lake. The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission's lake management plan (2018 preliminary draft, posted by the city) puts the lake at 1,010 acres within the City of Delafield and the Village of Nashotah, with a maximum depth of 90 feet and a mean depth of 26 feet. A dam on the Bark River raises the water about seven feet.

I checked the shoreline against the Census Bureau's boundary files at 14 points around the lake in October 2026. Every point was in the City of Delafield except for a stretch at the north tip, which sits in the Village of Nashotah. None of it is in the Town of Delafield. If you are shopping for Nagawicka frontage, you are shopping in the city.

The housing mix is wider than the lake would suggest. The 2020-2024 Census ACS counts 3,445 housing units in the city. About 59% are single-family detached homes, and about 27% are in buildings of five or more units, mostly along the I-94 and Golf Road corridor. Of the 3,209 occupied homes, 1,981, about 62%, are owner-occupied. The ACS puts the median value of an owner-occupied home at $555,800 and median gross rent at $1,457 a month. Only 22 units are classified as seasonal or recreational, so this is a year-round city.

The roads to know are I-94, which crosses the south side of the city with interchanges at State Highway 83 and County Road C, State Highway 83 north toward Hartland, and Genesee Street, the main street through downtown. City hall is at 500 Genesee Street. From Lake County, Illinois, the closest comparison I can give people is a small lake city with its own downtown, a short drive from a freeway, where the lakefront houses are a minority of the housing stock.

Nagawicka has two public launches and a county park, so summer weekends bring traffic. The school district line runs through the lakeshore, so two neighbors can pay different rates and attend different schools. And at about 1 hour 42 minutes from Vernon Hills, it is a longer drive than Geneva Lake.

Delafield divides into a few clear pockets: the Nagawicka shoreline, the historic downtown, the I-94 and Golf Road commercial corridor, and the wooded subdivisions on the city's outer edges. The useful way to search is by pocket first and then by school district, because the district line runs through the middle of the city and changes the tax bill.

The Nagawicka shoreline is the luxury market. Nagawicka Road follows part of the shoreline and is where the public lakefront sales in this guide took place. The rest of the shore mixes older lake houses, newer custom homes and channel lots. Some lakefront parcels are on channels rather than open water, and the city runs a separate pier pick-up schedule for the channels, so ask which kind of frontage a listing has.

Downtown is the walkable core. The city defines a Downtown Delafield District along Genesee Street, Wells Street and Milwaukee Street near the Bark River, and applies design rules to it. Homes near downtown range from older cottages to newer townhomes and condominiums. The I-94 and Golf Road corridor holds most of the apartments, the hotels and the big-box retail.

Behind the lake, the city's outer pockets are wooded subdivisions of single-family homes, many built from the 1970s through the 2000s. The ACS counts 641 homes built in the 1990s alone, the largest single decade.

Nagawicka is the largest and deepest lake in the city and one of the deepest in Lake Country. Its 90-foot maximum depth, per the SEWRPC plan, puts it in the same depth class as Okauchee and well ahead of Pewaukee Lake's 45 feet. A Lake Country brokerage's March 2026 lake comparison rates it a moderate-activity lake with less weekend traffic than Pewaukee, and notes the Nagawicka Lake Yacht Club runs sailing races through the summer.

The public price record for the lake is thinner than I would like. The two clearest reported sales are from July 2019. BizTimes reported that a 7,035-square-foot home with five bedrooms on 1.2 acres on Nagawicka Road, with 87 feet of frontage, a four-car heated garage and a 600-square-foot boathouse, sold for $2.34 million against an assessed value of about $1.6 million. Three weeks later, BizTimes reported an 8,300-square-foot house built in 2006 on 1 acre, also on Nagawicka Road, with about 95 feet of frontage, a heated pool and a boathouse, sold for $2.79 million against an assessed value of about $1.49 million. Both are more than seven years old.

The current numbers come from indexes, and they bracket the market. In August 2026, Zillow's top-tier home value for Delafield, the typical value of the most expensive third of homes, was $1,309,373, up 6.0% from a year earlier. The 2020-2024 Census ACS counts 278 owner-occupied homes valued at $1 million or more, about 14% of the total, and 24 valued at $2 million or more. The ACS margins on those small counts are wide.

Here is the honest price picture. Delafield is a luxury lake market at the lakefront and a strong suburban market everywhere else. Nagawicka frontage on open water, with 80 to 100 feet of shoreline and a newer house, was a $2.3 million to $2.8 million product in 2019, and the indexes have risen since. Channel lots and older lake houses trade lower. Off-lake homes in the city's subdivisions sit around the Zillow typical value. It is not a $10 million market. For eight-figure lakefront in Waukesha County, the reported sales are on Pine Lake in Chenequa and on Oconomowoc Lake.

The Lake County, Illinois buyers I talk to who look north at Wisconsin lake property usually start with Geneva Lake. Nagawicka comes up when they want a deep lake with a real downtown they can walk or boat to, at a lower entry price than the Geneva Lake shore.

The City of Delafield polices Nagawicka. Its lake patrol page says the patrol began in 1972, is run by the city police department and covers a lake of about 1,000 acres in the center of the city. The patrol offers free boat safety inspections on request and posts the state and city rules at the two public launches, on Bleeker Street and at Naga-Waukee Park.

The city's posted rules sheet, a 2011 document still linked from its Nagawicka Lake Rules page, sets a 45 mph limit outside the buoyed areas and 10 mph from a half hour after sunset to a half hour before sunrise. From June through August, on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., the limit drops to 25 mph. Boats must stay at slow-no-wake between the buoys and the shoreline and in the channels. Because that sheet is old, check Chapter 19 of the city code, which the police page cites for lake rules, before you count on any number.

High water changes everything. The city's lake management page says that when Nagawicka rises 10 inches or more above its maximum permitted level, the whole lake becomes slow-no-wake at no more than 3 mph, and stays that way until the level falls below 8 inches above the maximum. The city also publishes wake surf guidelines and a lake level meter, runs weed harvesting through early September, and picks up lake weeds from piers on Mondays and Fridays on the main lake and twice a month in the channels.

Piers follow state law. The Wisconsin DNR Pier Planner (April 2026) says a new pier needs no DNR permit if it is no more than 6 feet wide, has a loading platform of 200 square feet or less, and reaches only to the 3-foot depth or the depth needed to moor a boat. It allows two boat slips for the first 50 feet of shoreline and one more for each additional full 50 feet. On a typical 90-foot Nagawicka lot that is two slips. Ask whether an existing pier or boat lift setup is larger and grandfathered before you assume it transfers.

Public access is real here. The SEWRPC plan describes Naga-Waukee Park as a Waukesha County park with a beach, campgrounds and a paved launch with parking on Mariner Drive, plus a city launch on Bleeker Street. A home without frontage still gets you onto the lake as a day user. Daily use from your own pier is what frontage buys.

Delafield has enough sales to support an index, which the smaller lake villages around it do not. Zillow's home value index put the typical Delafield home at $766,469 in August 2026, up 6.3% from August 2025. The top tier, the most expensive third, was $1,309,373, up 6.0%. Zillow's figure for the 53018 ZIP code, which the city shares with the Town of Delafield, was $695,244 for the middle tier and $1,099,461 for the top tier, up 5.8% and 6.0%.

Those numbers place Delafield near the top of Lake Country. In the same August 2026 data, Zillow's typical value was $570,804 in Pewaukee, $672,143 in Hartland, $742,329 in Nashotah and $776,275 in Summit. Only the small lake villages run far higher; Oconomowoc Lake was $2,082,456.

The Census numbers come in lower, and the gap is expected. The 2020-2024 ACS puts the median owner-occupied value at $555,800, with a margin of about $57,000. The ACS is a five-year survey of owner estimates, so it lags a rising market, and it includes condos and older homes that pull the median down. Zillow's index tracks current values of all homes it models in the area. When the two disagree, I read the ACS as the slow, broad picture and Zillow as the current one.

The stock is mixed in age. The ACS counts 254 homes built before 1940, about 7%, and 903 built since 2000, about 26%. Single-family homes are about 59% of units, townhomes and two-to-four-unit buildings about 14%, and larger apartment and condo buildings about 27%. That mix is why the city has a rental market at all: 1,228 occupied homes are rented, at a median gross rent of $1,457.

I'm not using MLS statistics on this page. Wisconsin sold data comes through a different MLS than the Illinois one I work in, and a citywide median would mix lakefront estates with condos. For a specific house, the recent sales in the same pocket and school district are the numbers worth using.

Coming from Lake County, Illinois, the tax bill is the first thing people compare. Wisconsin bills are built from a mill rate, the dollars of tax per $1,000 of value. The DOR's 2025 Town, Village and City Taxes report, covering taxes levied in 2025 and collected in 2026, shows $27,387,763 in property tax on $2,667,384,100 of full value in the City of Delafield. That is a gross rate of about $10.27 per $1,000 and an effective rate of about $9.06 after the state school levy credit.

The assessment level matters when you read a bill. The same report puts the city's assessments at 96% of full value. Your bill multiplies the assessed value by the local rate, so the rate printed on a Delafield bill runs a little higher than the full-value rate, about $9.44 per $1,000 of assessed value by my arithmetic. The tax dollars come out the same either way.

Those are citywide averages, and the school district moves the real number. By the DOR's figures, about 68% of the city's taxable value is in the Kettle Moraine School District, about 29% is in the Lake Country K-8 district plus Arrowhead Union High School, and about 3% is in the Oconomowoc Area School District. The Department of Public Instruction's 2025-26 mill rates are 6.78 for Kettle Moraine, 3.19 for Lake Country plus 1.84 for Arrowhead (5.03 combined) and 5.79 for Oconomowoc. The gap between Kettle Moraine and the Lake Country and Arrowhead pair is about $1.75 per $1,000.

That gap lands on the lake. When I sampled the Nagawicka shoreline against the Census Bureau's school district boundaries, most points on the east, north and west shores came back in Lake Country and Arrowhead, and the points near downtown and the south end came back in Kettle Moraine. Treat that as a guide only. The tax bill names the district for each parcel.

Here is a worked example. A $2,500,000 Nagawicka home at the city's 2025 effective rate of $9.06 per $1,000 would carry about $22,650 a year. The school district could move that by roughly $4,375 between Kettle Moraine and the Lake Country and Arrowhead pair. For comparison, Ownwell's data for Lake Forest, Illinois shows a median effective rate of 1.87%, which on the same $2,500,000 would be about $46,750.

Two Wisconsin credits come off the bill afterward. The lottery and gaming credit applies only to a Wisconsin resident's primary residence. For 2025-26 it is figured on up to $27,000 of value, per the DOR's November 2025 notice, times the school tax rate, which works out to roughly $135 to $185 in Delafield by my arithmetic. The first dollar credit applies to every improved parcel. Unpaid sewer charges after November 1 are added to the tax bill with a 10% fee, per the city's utility page.

When you sell, Wisconsin charges a real estate transfer fee of $0.30 per $100 of value, or $3 per $1,000. On a $2,500,000 sale that is $7,500.

This is general information, not tax advice. Your actual bill depends on the parcel, the assessment, the school district and the credits you qualify for.

Delafield is split between two public school models. Most of the city, including downtown, is in the Kettle Moraine School District, a K-12 district. A large share of the lakeshore and the north side is in the Lake Country School District, a single K-8 school that feeds Arrowhead Union High School in Hartland. A sliver on the west edge is in the Oconomowoc Area School District. Which one serves a given house depends on the parcel, so check the district on the tax bill and confirm with the district office before you write an offer.

Kettle Moraine runs several high school options, which is unusual. Ask the district how enrollment in each works before you count on a seat.

Delafield's utility setup surprises buyers coming from Illinois suburbs. The city's utility page says most homes have private wells and city sanitary sewer. Sewer bills come quarterly, a 1% penalty applies to late payments, and any unpaid sewer balance after November 1 goes onto the property tax bill. Wastewater is treated by the Delafield-Hartland Water Pollution Control Commission, which serves the city, the Village of Hartland, the Town of Delafield, the Village of Nashotah and the Village of Summit.

For a buyer, that means a well test on almost every purchase, even on a sewered lakefront lot. Ask the seller for recent water test results and the well's age and depth. If a property is still on a septic system, Waukesha County's environmental health office offers a well and septic evaluation for sales, and county rules require septic pumping or inspection on a set schedule.

Shoreland rules work differently inside a city. Waukesha County's shoreland protection ordinance applies to the unincorporated towns and the Village of Lac La Belle, so it does not govern the Nagawicka shore. The city's own zoning code does, along with state rules for work below the ordinary high-water mark. The city's lake page notes that it follows Chapter 30 of the state statutes with the DNR for permits like piers, shoreline protection and dredging, and posts a Chapter 30 permit application. Before you plan a teardown or an addition on the lake, ask the city planner for the setback from the water and the height and lot coverage limits for that parcel's zoning district.

Flood maps are worth a look. The city posts FEMA's proposed flood insurance rate map panels for its area, and a lake with a dam and a high-water no-wake rule is a lake where low lots near the channels can flood. Check the panel for any low-lying lot before you write an offer.

Services are city-run or shared. The city has its own police department, contracts fire and EMS through Lake Country Fire and Rescue, and offers park and recreation programs through the Village of Hartland.

Downtown Delafield is the reason many buyers pick the city over the lake villages around it. The city's about page lists three shopping areas: the Highway 83 and I-94 interchange with department stores, national retailers and hotels; the downtown district with independent shops and restaurants and the Delafield Hotel; and Village Square on Highway 83 and 16 with a large grocery store and a fitness center.

The downtown look is protected. The city's downtown design rules require storefront windows on at least 40% of a retail building's first-floor facade, ask new buildings to follow the Colonial, Neo-classical, Federal, Victorian and Greek Revival styles found in the area when the city incorporated, ban new backlit signs and awnings, cap flush wall signs at 25 square feet, and push parking behind buildings. Concrete block and artificial stone and brick veneers are prohibited under the district rules.

The lake has a fine-dining anchor again. BizTimes reported that The Commodore, a Bartolotta restaurant and event venue, opened on July 24, 2024, at 1807 Nagawicka Road after a two-year rebuild of the 27,000-square-foot former Seven Seas building on a 3.9-acre site.

Civic life runs through the year. The city's about page names the Delafield Block Party and a downtown Halloween celebration, and points visitors to Hawks Inn for scheduled tours. The Naga-Waukee Ice Arena is open all year.

The biggest outdoor asset sits just south of the city line. Lapham Peak, a unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest, is in the Town of Delafield, a short drive down County Road C. The DNR's Lapham Peak page describes a 45-foot observation tower on the highest point in Waukesha County, 1,233 feet above sea level, and lighted cross-country ski trails. Wikipedia adds more than 25 miles of trails, a segment of the Ice Age Trail and an outdoor stage called SummerStage that hosts plays and concerts.

Inside the city, the parks page points to the Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Riverwalk, a three-quarter-mile path along the Bark River between the pond south of downtown and Cushing Memorial Park with nine war memorial sites, a bridge and a Peace Garden. The city also publishes a bicycle and pedestrian plan, and regional trails cross the area: the Lake Country Recreational Trail between Oconomowoc and Waukesha and the Glacial Drumlin State Trail to the south.

Naga-Waukee Park, run by Waukesha County, sits on the lake with a beach, a boat launch, campgrounds and a golf course. Between the county park, the state forest unit and the lake, the city gives a buyer more public green space within a few miles than most suburbs I work in north of Chicago.

The newest proposal is on the south side. BizTimes reported on September 29, 2026, that Miller Marriott Construction has filed plans with the city's Plan Commission for a mixed-use residential development on a 7.8-acre former school parcel between Spanjer Street and Farrand Lane. The plans could include 65 residences and commercial space. It is a proposal still under review; follow the Plan Commission agendas.

On the lake, the biggest recent change was the reopening of the former Seven Seas property as The Commodore in July 2024, covered in the downtown section. Around the city, state and county road projects on I-94 and Highway 83 are listed by the neighboring Town of Delafield, which shares the interchanges.

For a buyer near a project site, the practical steps are the same as anywhere: read the Plan Commission packet, check the zoning map on the city's site and ask how construction traffic will route.

Delafield is a Milwaukee-area city, and from Lake County, Illinois it is beyond the 90-minute line. These are free-flow estimates from OpenStreetMap routing (OSRM), computed in October 2026 from city hall at 500 Genesee Street. Real trips vary with traffic and season.

Vernon Hills is about 84 miles away, roughly 1 hour 42 minutes, and Lake Forest about 81 miles, roughly 1 hour 38 minutes. Downtown Chicago's Loop is about 111 miles, roughly 2 hours 16 minutes, and O'Hare about 107 miles, roughly 2 hours 26 minutes. Downtown Milwaukee is about 27 miles and 34 minutes away, and Milwaukee Mitchell Airport about 32 miles and 44 minutes. Madison is about 52 miles and 63 minutes west. Lake Geneva is about 38 miles and an hour south.

The route from Lake County is north on I-94 through Kenosha and Racine Counties to the Milwaukee area, then west on I-94 to the Highway 83 or County Road C exit. Milwaukee is the practical hub. Amtrak's Hiawatha to Chicago Union Station leaves from the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, about 26 miles and 32 minutes from city hall, and from the Milwaukee Airport station. Metra does not reach this far north.

This is the main trade-off for an Illinois buyer. On the same routing, Lake Geneva is about 42 miles and 59 minutes from Vernon Hills. Nagawicka is closer to an hour and three quarters. For a weekend house that is workable; for a house you plan to use on short notice, drive it on a Friday afternoon before you decide.

The Delafield Police Department, based in the city's Public Safety Building, provides police service throughout the city and runs the Nagawicka lake patrol. Fire and EMS come through Lake Country Fire and Rescue. I don't characterize the safety of any town or neighborhood. Anyone who wants the data can contact the department directly or look it up in the FBI's Crime Data Explorer.