Most Austin homeowners never protest their property taxes and it costs them

Travis County homeowners who did not protest their 2025 property taxes left about $597 each on the table. The ones who did protest there won 89 percent of the time, and the winners averaged a 9.0 percent cut to their assessed value. Those numbers come from Ownwell’s protest versus non-protest study, which pulled certified county data across 17 Texas counties for 2023 through 2025.

So that is a coin flip you win nine times out of ten, for free, and most people do not take it. In Texas, 54 percent of homeowners have never protested once. Of the people who never have, 37 percent said they did not know they were allowed to. That is Ownwell’s 2026 Texas homeowner survey, 520 Texas homeowners, taken this past March.

I have been licensed in Texas since 2009 and I still get surprised by how many people think the number on the notice is just the number. It is not. It is an opening offer from a mass appraisal model that has never seen the inside of your house.

But I am going to be honest with you about something most articles on this topic skip. For a decent chunk of Austin homeowners, protesting will not save you a single dollar this year. There is one line on your notice that tells you which group you are in, and I would rather you check it in 30 seconds than waste a Saturday. Lets get into it.

Is it worth protesting property taxes? Start with these numbers

Here is the whole case laid out. Every row is sourced, and I dropped the rows I could not verify against a primary document.

Now I owe you one honest caveat on that 32 percent, because Travis County is not the average. In 2025 about 46 percent of Travis County residential properties protested, which is well ahead of the 17-county number. So it is not fair to say almost nobody here does it. What is fair is that a 32 percent protest rate across those 17 counties still sits next to 54 percent of Texas homeowners telling a survey they have never protested. Both can be true at the same time, and they are not even measuring the same thing. One counts properties in a single year, out of certified county records. The other counts people over all the years they have owned a home, and it is self-reported. A property that gets protested every spring still only shows up once in the first number. Travis at 46 percent is the outlier sitting on top of all that.

Either way, look at the gap. Half the state has never tried it, and the ones who do win nearly nine times out of ten in Travis County. That is not a hard call. So why does anybody skip it?

Kahneman’s whole thing in Thinking Fast and Slow is that we feel a loss roughly twice as hard as we feel a gain of the same size. Which should make this easy, because the tax bill IS the loss. But the work is today and the money does not show up until October, and that gap is where most people quit. Nothing about that is stupid. It is just how people are built.

Check this one line first, because it might make the whole thing moot

Your Notice of Appraised Value has three numbers on it, not one. TCAD spells them out: market value, which is what your place would sell for as of January 1. Net appraised value, which is market value after the homestead cap gets applied (or, on some non-homestead property under about $5.32 million, after a separate limit called the circuit breaker, which expires at the end of 2026). And taxable value, which is net appraised minus your exemptions. That last number is the one your tax rate actually gets multiplied against.

The Texas Comptroller explains the cap under Tax Code 23.23. If you had a homestead exemption last year and this year, your appraised value cannot climb more than 10 percent in a year, no matter what the market did. New improvements are excluded, so if you added a casita, that part is fair game.

Here is why that matters more than anything else in this article. If your market value is way above your net appraised value, the cap is already doing the work for you. Knocking 5 percent off market value does nothing, because the number they tax you on comes off the capped value, not off market value. You would win the argument and your bill would not move.

And this is not a rare edge case in Travis County. TCAD’s 2026 notice announcement puts the median residential homestead market value at $493,449 and the median taxable value at $384,747. That is a $108,702 spread on the median house (some of that is exemptions, some of it is the cap, but either way it is a lot of daylight). TCAD mailed those notices to more than 427,000 property owners.

So before you do anything: pull up your notice, find market value and net appraised value, and see how close they are. If they are within a few percent of each other, you are not capped and a protest goes straight to your bill. If there is a big gap, you are capped and your energy is better spent somewhere else this year. That is the 30 second version, and I wish somebody had told me that the first time I did this for myself.

What the actual sales say about whether you have a case

Ok, say you checked and you are not capped. Now the question is whether you can prove the number is too high. A protest is won with comparable sales, not with feelings about the appraisal district (telling an appraiser the county wastes money is a fine opinion and it has never once moved a value).

We keep our own database of every closed sale in the Austin market, so I pulled it. Below is the median closed residential sale price for the 12 months ending July 31, 2026, next to the 12 months before that. Same window, same definition, both years. Sale counts are in there so you can see how much weight each row carries.

Twelve of the fifteen cities in that table sold for less over the last year than they did the year before. Four of the five counties are down. Travis County is off 1.5 percent on more than 14,000 closings, which is a big enough sample that it is not noise.

Now go back and read that TCAD line again. The appraisal roll went UP 5.48 percent in 2026, to $482 billion. TCAD says that growth came mostly from healthcare, industrial and office commercial property, and that single family homes actually declined 1.8 percent on average. So the countywide number and the residential number are telling two different stories, and if you only read the headline you would think everybody’s house went up.

If your notice went up and your city is on the minus side of that table, you have a starting point. You still need actual comps from your own street, not a countywide average, and that is a whole separate conversation I already wrote up in how to use comparable sales to protest.

Wimberley is the exception, and I am not going to hide it

Wimberley is up 19 percent on 233 sales. Spicewood is up 3.5. Bee Cave is up a little, though on 33 sales I would not build a case on that either direction. If you own in one of those three, the sales data is working against you and the appraisal district is going to hand it right back to you at the hearing. Doesn’t mean you can’t win on condition or on unequal appraisal. It does mean the easy argument is gone.

Do it yourself, or pay somebody 40 percent?

Texas protest firms work on contingency. Nothing upfront, and they take a cut of what they save you, typically 25 to 50 percent of the first year. Some carry minimum fees on top. Run that against the $597 the average Travis non-protester gave up:

• You file it yourself: you keep the whole $597.
• A firm at 25 percent: they keep about $149, you keep about $448.
• A firm at 40 percent: they keep about $239, you keep about $358.
• A firm at 50 percent: you split it, roughly $299 each.

So here is my honest read, and it costs me nothing to say it because I do not run a protest firm. If you own one homestead and you have an afternoon, file it yourself. It is a form, some comps, and a phone call. If you own five rentals, or you travel constantly, or you tried once and the hearing rattled you, pay somebody. Forty percent of something beats 100 percent of the nothing you were going to do anyway, right.

The one thing I would not do is hire a firm and then never look at what they filed. I have seen owners go three years without opening the settlement letter (I am not going to pretend I have never done that with a bill either).

The part nobody mentions: this year’s win lowers next year’s ceiling

The 10 percent cap is calculated off last year’s appraised value. So the number is not just this year’s bill. If you get your appraised value cut this year, next year’s cap starts from the lower number, and the year after that starts from THAT number. It compounds in your favor, quietly, for as long as you own the place. Same math that works against you on the way up, just pointed the other direction, right.

Which is the real cost of never protesting. It is not $597. It is $597, and then a slightly higher starting line every single year after that, forever. Skipping it once is cheap. Skipping it for a decade is how people end up with a tax bill that has nothing to do with what their house is worth.

If you own something that is not your homestead, the rules are different. Tax Code 23.231 put a 20 percent cap on non-homestead real property under about $5.32 million for 2026, but that section expires December 31, 2026. Landlords should plan on that protection going away.

The dates, and where to go next

Lets get the calendar straight, because this is where people lose. Notices go out in the spring. You have until May 15, or 30 days after the district delivered your notice, whichever is later. TCAD ran informal meetings starting April 6 in 2026, with ARB hearings beginning in June. The informal is a conversation with a staff appraiser who can hand you a settlement offer on the spot, not a courtroom, and you only go to the ARB if you turn that offer down.

For the mechanics, I would start with our complete guide to property tax protests in Austin, which walks the whole process for Travis, Williamson and Hays. If you want the shorter Travis-specific version, here is how to protest in Travis County. And make sure your homestead exemption is actually on file before you argue about anything else, because that exemption is worth more than most protests are. Our Texas homestead exemption guide covers it.

If you want to know why your bill is what it is in the first place, I broke down how the 2026 Travis County rates get set and did the same thing for Hays County.

You cannot argue about a number you do not know

Every protest comes down to one claim: my house is not worth what you say it is worth. Which means you need to know what it IS worth, from actual closed sales near you, before you walk in. Not a Zestimate. Not what your neighbor swears he got.

If you want a second set of eyes on it

I am not a property tax consultant and I do not take a cut of your savings. But I do look at Austin-area comps every single day, and telling somebody whether their notice is defensible takes me about ten minutes. If your number looks off and you want a sanity check before the deadline, reach out or find me on my profile page. At Neuhaus Realty Group we work Lakeway, Bee Cave, Dripping Springs and the rest of west Austin, and we have the closed sales to back up an opinion.

Be safe, be good, and be nice to people. Even the ones at the appraisal district, they are just doing a job.