, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.A longtime homeowner in McAllen. A senior living in southeast Austin. The owners of a home in a quickly gentrifying Dallas neighborhood.
Texas lawmakers last year expanded the state’s primary tax break for homeowners — its homestead exemption on school district taxes, which exempts a portion of a home’s value from being taxed by public schools. Votersput forth by the Legislature in November to boost the exemption from $40,000 to $100,000. Lawmakers allocated $5.6 billion to pay for the bump in the exemption.
How much relief any given homeowner received from the latest round of tax cuts depends on a number of factors, including when they bought their home, where they live and how local taxing entities have responded to changes in state law that limit how much they can raise tax rates each year. But all homeowners whose tax bills the Tribune reviewed saw their property taxes go down as a result of the 2023 cuts.
A homeowner in Lockhart, a town of about 15,000 outside of Austin, saw her property tax bill more than halved in 2023 compared with what she paid in 2018 — though the market value of her home had more than doubled in that time. , according to the Texas Apartment Association — though that share can be higher in the state’s urban areas.did not include measures tailored for tenants of rental properties
The average Harris County homeowner paid almost 19% less on their 2023 tax bill than they did five years before, figures provided by the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office show. State lawmakers also enacted stricter limits on how much more cities, counties and school districts could collect in property taxes each year without voter approval. The idea was to keep tax bills from going up too quickly by effectively forcing local governments and school districts to lower their tax rates as property values rise.
Lawmakers have also sought cuts that benefit homeowners in particular. In 2015, the Legislature expanded the state’s homestead exemption on taxes paid to school districts for maintenance and operations from $15,000 to $25,000. Voters bumped it up again to $40,000 in 2022.