Property tax rates are not the same across the Austin metro

A $500,000 house in Wimberley owes about $7,049 a year in property taxes before exemptions. The same $500,000 house in Manor owes about $12,145. Same metro, same house, same money, and the gap is $5,096 a year. Over a ten year hold that is $50,960, which is a kitchen, or a truck, or one really long vacation you are not taking. Sounds like a lot right. It is, and almost nobody checks it before they write an offer.

Those numbers come off the tax year 2025 adopted rate sheets published by the Travis County Tax Office, Williamson County, and the Hays Central Appraisal District. Three counties, three separate documents, none of which talk to each other. So I pulled all three and built the one table nobody publishes, which is what the whole metro looks like side by side. (I built it in a spreadsheet on a Saturday, which probably tells you more about how I spend my weekends than you wanted to know.)

And I want to be straight with you up front, because the ending of this post argues with the beginning. The rate table is real. It is also not your tax bill. I will show you our own sales data at the end and it flips half the rankings upside down.

Austin metro property tax rates, side by side

Every row below is county plus city plus school district, at the 2025 adopted rates, on a $500,000 assessed value before any exemptions. The county column is every unit that taxes the whole county: in Travis that is the county itself plus Central Health, in Williamson it is the county plus the FM and road levy, in Hays it is the county plus Special Road.

Top to bottom that is a spread of $1.0192 per $100. (That is per hundred dollars of assessed value, not per house, which trips up everybody moving here from a state that does it differently.) The most expensive address on this list pays 1.72 times what the cheapest one pays on an identical house.

A few things I left out on purpose. Austin Community College levies $0.1034 and it shows up on a lot of these bills, but its taxing district follows a list of annexed school districts instead of county lines, so it is not countywide anywhere and I could not put it in a column honestly. Emergency services districts are out for the same reason. And MUDs are out, which is a bigger deal than it sounds, and we are getting to that.

Also, look at Wimberley. The city levies no property tax at all. Zero. It does not even have a line on the Hays CAD sheet. That is not an oversight, that is just how the city has run.

The school district is the biggest line on every one of these bills

Ok so here is the thing that surprises people. Everybody argues about city tax rates, and in all fifteen of these places the school district is the single largest line on the bill. Even in Manor, which has by far the highest city rate on the list at $0.8537, Manor ISD at $1.0814 is still bigger.

Look at Bee Cave. Two cents. Two. Its city tax on a $500,000 house is $100 a year, which is less than one dinner out. The city has charged exactly two cents every year since 2005, and I have written about why that Bee Cave rate is what it is before. But Bee Cave sits in Lake Travis ISD at $1.0397, so the total still lands at $1.5536, third cheapest of the fifteen. The city saved you $2,520 a year versus Austin. The school district gave a chunk of it back.

Now flip it. The City of Austin charges $0.524017, one of the highest city rates on the list. But Austin ISD charges $0.9252, the third lowest of the fifteen school rates in this table, behind only Eanes and Round Rock ISD. Austin ends up eleventh out of fifteen. Not first. Everybody assumes Austin is the expensive tax address in the metro and it just is not, and part of the reason is that Austin ISD sends a large share of what it collects back to the state under recapture instead of keeping it.

The school spread is where the real money is. Eanes ISD is $0.8322. Hutto ISD is $1.2052. That is 37 cents apart, which on a $500,000 house is $1,865 a year from the school district alone, before anybody has said a word about the city.

So if you are shopping and you want to know what your bill will look like, the first question is not what city, it is what school district. That is not that hard right.

The MUD is the part nobody prices in

Here is where people get hurt, and I mean actually hurt, like write-an-offer-and-find-out-later hurt.

A municipal utility district is its own taxing unit and it stacks on top of everything in that table above. Somebody had to pay to put water and roads and drainage under a subdivision that used to be a pasture, and the MUD is how that gets financed. Fine. But the rates are all over the map, and two houses a mile apart can be thousands of dollars apart.

Read that top row and that bottom row again. $0.0531 to $1.0000. The MUD spread is about as wide as the entire city-to-city spread in the first table, and it is invisible in the listing and invisible in every cost-of-living-in-Austin article ever written.

Run the math on it. Bee Cave’s combined rate is $1.5536, third cheapest of the fifteen. Put that same Bee Cave house inside a MUD levying the full $1.0000 and the combined rate becomes $2.5536, or $12,768 a year. Manor, the most expensive address in my whole table, is $12,145. So the cheap-tax city with a big MUD costs more than the expensive-tax city without one. If you take one thing out of this post, take that.

I go deeper on how these districts work and how to find out whether a specific address sits in one in our complete guide to MUDs, PIDs and special taxing districts, and there is a shorter version in this post on how MUD and PID districts hit your bill.

Now let me ruin my own headline

Everything above compares an identical $500,000 house in fifteen places. That is the right way to isolate a tax rate. It is a terrible way to predict what you will actually pay, because nobody buys the same house in Manor that they buy in Lakeway.

So I pulled our own sales data and ran the combined rate against what a median home actually sold for in each of these places in July 2026, the most recent complete month we have. I left out Bee Cave and West Lake Hills because they had almost no closings that month, and a median off three sales is not a median, it is an anecdote.

Kyle has the second highest combined rate on this list and pays the lowest actual bill on it. Lakeway has the third lowest rate on this list and pays the highest actual bill on it. And Manor, which I spent two sections calling the most expensive address in the table, lands about $138 a year away from Wimberley, which has the lowest rate on the list. That is a rounding error, on a rate gap of more than a full dollar.

Kahneman called it “what you see is all there is.” The rate is the number printed on the page, so it is the number people argue about. The assessed value is not printed anywhere, so it barely registers. But your bill is those two numbers multiplied together, and the one nobody looks at is usually the bigger of the two.

One honest caveat on that table, and it matters. A July sold price is not a January 1 assessed value. Texas values property as of January 1, and around here the January comps run well below the summer ones. So treat that last column as a directional comparison between places, not as a prediction of your own notice. I unpacked that gap in this post on whether your home is over-assessed.

How to actually use this when you are shopping

Lets make this practical, because a table is only worth something if it changes what you do on a Saturday.

Ask for the address, not the city. A city name gets you a two-cent answer or a fifty-cent answer and tells you nothing about the MUD, the ESD, or the PID sitting on that particular lot. The tax bill is an address-level fact, it is not a city-level fact.

Multiply, do not compare. Take the combined rate for that address, multiply it by what you are actually going to pay for the house, and set that number next to the same math on the other house you are considering. That is the only comparison that means anything.

Then subtract the homestead exemption. Every school district in this table gives the same $140,000 general homestead exemption after Proposition 13 passed in November 2025, and because it is a flat dollar amount rather than a percentage, it is worth more where the school rate is higher. In Eanes ISD it saves $1,165 a year. In Hutto ISD it saves $1,687. Your county and city knock off a bit more on top of that, and there is a full walk-through of those dollars in this post on the homestead deadline and in our homestead exemption guide.

And do not buy a house for the tax rate. I know that is a strange thing to say after three tables (my wife would like me to point out that I have also explained this at dinner parties, uninvited), but I have watched people talk themselves into a commute they hated to save $1,800 a year, and eighteen months later they moved. The rate is one input. Schools, drive time, what the house actually is, whether you want to be there on a Tuesday in February, all of that outranks it. Lets be honest, nobody has ever told me they love where they live because of the county road levy.

These are 2025 rates, and 2026 is being decided right now

Everything above is tax year 2025, because that is the last year every one of these jurisdictions has a final adopted number. The 2026 rates get set on a rolling basis, one board meeting at a time. The statutory deadline is the same for every taxing unit, the later of September 30 or 60 days after it gets the certified appraisal roll (Texas Tax Code 26.05). In practice most of it happens across August and September board meetings, and the order is not predictable. Some slip past that. Which is why any snapshot of “current” rates goes stale about a week after somebody publishes it.

The relationships hold, though. A 37 cent gap between Eanes and Hutto does not close in one budget cycle, and Bee Cave is not about to start charging Manor’s rate. If you want to watch the 2026 numbers land as they happen, I broke down how the Travis County side is shaping up and there is a companion piece on what is moving in Hays County. Williamson County posts its adopted rates to its own tax rate page.

And once your number shows up in October, if it looks wrong, it might be. Most people never say a word about it, which I wrote about in this piece on why almost nobody protests. The whole playbook is in our complete guide to Austin property taxes.

Want the number for a specific address?

If you are comparing two houses in two different districts and you want to know what each one actually costs to own, send me both addresses and I will run the full stack on each one, MUD and all. It takes about ten minutes and it has changed which house somebody bought more than once.

You can also just go look for yourself. Browse what is on the market in Wimberley, Bee Cave, Lakeway, Dripping Springs, Round Rock, Georgetown, Cedar Park, Leander, Buda, Kyle, Pflugerville or Austin, save a search so you see what comes up, and then bring me the addresses.

Reach out or get in touch with the team at Neuhaus Realty Group. Be safe, be good, and be nice to people.