The average Fort Worth home lost $13,616 in taxable value this year and the city has proposed raising its property tax rate by 3.2 cents. The impact: The average homeowner’s bill would still fall about $17.
Thirty miles east, Dallas County’s median home gained value, the county raised its rate by roughly the same amount, and the median bill is going up more than $100. To do so, the county has to ask voters for permission in November. Fort Worth does not.
Two North Texas governments, one tax year, opposite outcomes.
Fort Worth put the arithmetic on a slide at a City Council budget work session Aug. 21. Last year the average home was worth $246,541 and paid $1,651.82 at a rate of 67 cents per $100 of value. This year the average home is worth $232,925 — a drop of 5.5 percent — and would pay $1,635.13 at the recommended rate of 70.2 cents. That is $16.69 less than last year.
Fort Worth detailed their decision in a two-page memo the city manager sent the council on Aug. 11. It reports the city’s no-new-revenue rate — the rate that would raise the same amount of money from the same properties as last year — at $0.670416. Last year’s adopted rate was $0.670000. The two are about four-hundredths of a cent apart. In a year of rising values those numbers diverge sharply, because the same rate collects more. Here they nearly touch.
State law caps how far above the no-new-revenue rate a city can go without asking permission. Fort Worth’s ceiling, called the voter-approval rate, is $0.707594. The recommended 70.2 cents falls under it. City Manager Jesus “Jay” Chapa wrote that the rate “is scheduled to be adopted on September 15, 2026, following a public hearing on that same date.”
Dallas County went the other way, and its own notice says so in capital letters. “THE TAX RATE WILL EFFECTIVELY BE RAISED BY 22.02 PERCENT,” reads the notice the county posts on its website, a disclosure the Tax Code requires when a government crosses the line. Commissioners held a public hearing Aug. 11 and adopted a rate of $0.248650 per $100 the same day, under Court Order 2026-0878, against a no-new-revenue rate of $0.203785.
Because that rate exceeds what the county may adopt on its own, the county ordered an election. Dallas County voters decide Nov. 3 whether to keep it. If they reject it, the rate drops back.
The bills tell the story better than the rates do. Dallas County’s median homestead was worth $259,385 last year and paid $558.97. This year it is worth $268,056 and would pay $666.52 — about $108 more. At the no-new-revenue rate the same house would pay $546.26. The county’s budget raises $189,369,240 more from property taxes than last year’s, an increase of 22.51 percent, money commissioners have tied to homelessness and encampment programs, mental health treatment and housing.
Neither government is an outlier. In Bexar County, the county is holding its rate flat while San Antonio, Alamo Colleges and the San Antonio River Authority all propose increases, according to a running tally published Aug. 25 by the San Antonio Report. What varies across all of them is the roll.
Fort Worth’s council has one decision left that moves the number. Staff laid out $4,085,926 in services the recommended budget cuts — pay raises, code compliance, library branch hours, park maintenance, aquatics — and priced restoring all of them at 0.364391 of a penny, or $8.49 a year for the average homeowner. Adding them back would lift the rate to $0.7056 and shrink the average bill’s decline to $8.20.
The council votes Sept. 15. Dallas County’s voters get theirs Nov. 3.