Fort Worth wants to raise its property tax rate by 3.2 cents, and the average homeowner’s city tax bill would go down $21.34. Dallas is cutting its rate for the 11th straight year, and many homeowners will pay more. Those two facts are not contradictions. They are the same story, and it is playing out in every large city in Texas this month: appraised values came in flat or falling, and that pushes tax rates up even when city halls are not asking for more money.
The mechanism is a Texas invention. Every taxing unit must calculate a no-new-revenue rate — the rate that would collect the same amount of money next year as this year from the same properties. When taxable values fall, that rate mathematically rises. A city can hold its budget flat and still have to publish a higher rate to do it. Under Senate Bill 2, the 2019 property tax law, a city cannot collect more than 3.5 percent above last year’s revenue from existing property without asking voters, though revenue from new construction is not included in the cap.
Austin went furthest. The council adopted a $6.6 billion budget on Aug. 12 with a rate of 57.9948 cents per $100 of value — the maximum allowed without an election. The city puts the added property tax at $113.76 a year for a typical household, and the total increase hit at $285.84 once higher electric, water, trash and drainage charges are counted. Austin voters rejected a larger increase at the ballot last year, and council policy bars another such election until 2029.
San Antonio went the other way. City Manager Erik Walsh’s proposed budget, presented Thursday, raises the rate from 54.159 to 56.288 cents — the city’s first rate increase since 1992 — but stops below the cap, at about $2.95 a month for the average homeowner. Staff had floated taking the maximum, roughly $81 a year, in June; they backed off and banked the unused room, pairing the smaller increase with $89.6 million in cuts and 101 eliminated positions. San Antonio’s net taxable value is down about 2.7 percent, the San Antonio Report’s Andrea Drusch reported, worse than spring projections.
Fort Worth shows the paradox most cleanly. City Manager Jay Chapa proposed a rate of 70.2 cents to close a $94 million shortfall, returning the rate roughly to its 2023 level. Yet the average homeowner’s bill would fall to $1,630.48, because the average home value dropped to $232,000 from $246,000, Chapa told the council, per the Fort Worth Report’s Scott Nishimura. Citywide values rose 0.89 percent when staff had projected 2 to 3 percent — the result, city staff said, of the Tarrant Appraisal District’s move to reappraising homes every two years plus a surge in successful protests and litigation. Chapa said the alternative was “pretty hard community impacts like closing libraries, like closing community centers.”
Dallas is the mirror image. City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert’s proposed $5.66 billion budget trims the rate a tenth of a cent, from 69.88 to 69.78 cents, the 11th consecutive reduction and a 12.44 percent decline since 2015-16. It also eliminates 296 positions. But a lower rate applied to a higher appraisal still produces a bigger bill, which is why rate cuts and rising bills coexist so often in Texas.
Houston avoided the question entirely. Mayor John Whitmire’s fiscal 2027 budget carries no property tax increase and instead adds a $5 monthly solid-waste fee and a right-of-way rental charge on the city’s water and wastewater utilities. “Efficiency alone is no longer enough,” Whitmire said, citing state and local caps. Fees are not subject to the voter-approval limits that constrain tax rates.
El Paso took the opposite approach, with its council advancing the voter-approval maximum of 80.9 cents — about $132 more a year on the average home, as the Dispatch reported when the first hard numbers landed.
The decisions come quickly now. El Paso votes Aug. 18. Fort Worth holds a budget hearing Aug. 26 and votes on its rate Sept. 15, the same day Arlington adopts. Dallas votes Sept. 16, San Antonio Sept. 17. For homeowners watching their appraisal fall and their rate rise, the number that settles it is the one on the bill in October.