Your home might be over-assessed and the data can tell you

Between 30 and 60 percent of taxable property in the United States is over-assessed, and fewer than 5 percent of owners ever challenge it. That is the National Taxpayers Union Foundation‘s figure, not mine. So the odds your Austin-area home is carrying a value it does not deserve are somewhere between a coin flip and a long shot, and the odds you have ever actually checked are close to zero (I went years without checking my own, and I do this for a living, so I am not going to lecture anybody here).

Ok so lets figure out which one you are. The Travis Central Appraisal District mailed 2026 notices to more than 427,000 property owners this spring, and it put the median market value for a residential homestead at $493,449. Yours came with a number on it too. The question is whether that number can survive a look at what comparable homes actually sold for, and you can answer that yourself without hiring anybody.

What I see every spring is people reacting to the wrong thing. They open the envelope, see a big number, get mad, and either do nothing or file a protest with no evidence behind it. Both of those lose. The homeowners who win are the ones who spent twenty minutes with sold data first and figured out whether they had a case before they ever filled out a form.

The countywide number is probably fine. Your house is a separate question.

Here is the part that is going to annoy the people who came here for a villain. TCAD says single-family residences saw a 1.8 percent decline in market value for 2026. Our own MLS-fed sold data says the median sale in Travis County went from $475,000 in January 2025 to $470,000 in January 2026, which is down 1.1 percent. Now those are two different measurements and I am not going to pretend they are the same one. Theirs is the average change in market value across single-family homes countywide. Mine is the change in one month’s median sale price. But they point the same direction and they land close, and I have to give the appraisal district credit for that, which I do not love typing, because the easy version of this article is the one where the CAD is out to get you.

They are not out to get you. Mass appraisal is a modeling problem, and at the county level their model is landing near where our sales data lands.

Sold figures: Neuhaus Realty Group analysis of MLS closings. District figures: Travis CAD and Hays CAD preliminary values as reported April 15, 2026.

But a countywide average is a terrible description of any single house, and that is exactly where over-assessment lives. In Kyle, the median sale went from $336,020 in January 2025 to $300,990 in January 2026. That is a 10.4 percent drop in a county the district called relatively flat. If a Kyle home got moved along with the countywide trend instead of the Kyle trend, that owner is now paying on a value the market stopped supporting a year ago.

One more thing on averages, since Hays keeps coming up. Hays County’s total market value rose 9.69 percent for 2026, and that number gets quoted like it is a statement about houses. It is not. It includes new construction, commercial, and a 17 percent jump in multifamily. Your neighborhood is in there somewhere, buried under a lot of things that are not your neighborhood. My colleague went deeper on the Hays side in this breakdown of how Hays tax bills are shifting, and there is a Travis County companion too.

Compare your value to January 1, not to what Zillow says in August

This is the mistake I see most, and it is the whole reason people talk themselves out of a good case. Texas values your home as of January 1. Not as of when the notice arrived, not as of today. So the sales that matter for your 2026 value are the ones closing around the start of the year, and those are almost always lower than summer sales.

How much lower? The median sale in Travis County was $470,000 in January 2026 and $525,000 in July 2026. That is about 12 percent higher in the summer. So a homeowner who checks an online estimate in August, sees a number above their notice, and decides they are getting a deal has just compared themselves against the wrong six months.

Here is the January picture across the metro, which is the picture your 2026 value is supposed to reflect.

Neuhaus Realty Group analysis of MLS closings, single month of January in each year.

Now let me undercut my own table for a second, because I would rather you trust the rest of it. Lakeway closed 20 homes that January and Dripping Springs closed 30. A median off 20 sales is noisy. I wanted to tell you that +15.0 percent in Lakeway is just bigger houses happening to close that month, except the price per square foot went from $269 to $300 over the same stretch, which is up 11.5 percent, and that is not what a size-mix story looks like. So I do not have a clean explanation for you on that one. Treat both of those rows as directional and go pull real comps if you own there. Austin, Georgetown, Round Rock, and Kyle have enough closings behind them to lean on.

The price per square foot column is the one to actually use. If your home is 2,400 square feet in Round Rock and the district has you at $600,000, that is $250 a foot in a market that was trading at $196 in January. That gap is your entire argument, and you did not need a consultant to find it.

Kahneman and Tversky’s anchoring work is about how the first number you see drags your estimate of an unknown quantity toward it, and a value notice is about as pure an anchor as exists. The district hands you a number before you have formed any opinion at all, and from that moment every thought you have about your home’s worth is measured against their figure instead of against the sales. Getting the January comps in front of you first is how you break that.

Three numbers are on that notice and only one of them is the fight

Most people read one line on the notice and stop. There are really three, and confusing them wastes a lot of energy.

Market value is the district’s opinion of what your home would have sold for on January 1. Appraised value is that number after the homestead cap. Taxable value is what is left after your exemptions come off. In Travis County for 2026, the median homestead market value was $493,449 and the median taxable value was $384,747. That is $108,702 apart, about 22 percent, and it is mostly the cap and the exemptions doing their job.

Texas Tax Code Sec. 23.23 holds the appraised value of a homestead to a 10 percent annual increase, plus the value of any new improvements. Which is why you can get a notice showing your market value went down and your taxable value went up in the same year, and feel like somebody is playing games with you. Nobody is. Your capped value was just chasing a market value it never caught up to.

And read the definition of “new improvement” before you accept one. The statute says it does not include repairs or ordinary maintenance. A new roof after a hailstorm is maintenance. If somebody added value to your account for putting the house back the way it was, that is worth a phone call.

Uniform and equal is the check almost nobody runs

Here is the one that surprises people, and honestly it is my favorite part of the Texas code. You can be assessed at exactly what your home is worth and still win.

Tax Code Sec. 41.43(b) says an unequal appraisal protest is decided in favor of the property owner unless the appraisal district proves one of three things. The one that matters for most homeowners is (b)(3): that your appraised value is equal to or less than the median appraised value of a reasonable number of comparable properties, appropriately adjusted. Read that in terms of who has to do what. The burden sits on the district, not on you. That is a big deal right.

So the test is not “is my value fair.” The test is “am I carrying more than my neighbors in materially similar houses.” Pull five or six comparable homes on your CAD’s site, look at what the district assessed them at per square foot, and see where you land. If you are above the median of that group, you have a case that does not require you to argue about the market at all.

If you want the mechanics of turning those comps into evidence a review board will actually accept, we walked through that in detail in how to use comparable sales to protest your property taxes.

The things the district cannot see from a desk

Mass appraisal assumes your house is in roughly average condition for its age and neighborhood, because nobody from the district walked through it. That assumption is where the biggest individual errors hide, and it is the one category where you know something they cannot.

Foundation movement. A roof at the end of its life. Original kitchen and baths in a subdivision where everyone else remodeled in 2021. Backing to a road that got a lot louder. A drainage easement eating a third of the usable yard. Aluminum wiring, polybutylene, a failed septic. None of that shows up in a model that only knows your square footage and your year built.

Photos and contractor bids are what turn those into money. A bid to fix something is a dollar figure a review board can subtract, and an argument that your house “needs work” is not. That is the difference between a fifteen minute hearing that goes your way and one that does not. Special districts can pile on too, and if you are in a MUD or PID that is another line worth understanding, which we covered in how MUD and PID districts affect your bill.

The 2026 window closed in May. Here is what is actually left.

I am not going to pretend otherwise. The deadline was May 15 or 30 days after your notice was mailed, whichever came later, and once the spring is over that is gone. So if you are landing on this page after May, you cannot file a regular 2026 protest.

There is one path left, and it is narrow. Tax Code Sec. 25.25(d) lets you file a motion to correct the appraisal roll any time before your taxes go delinquent, which means before February 1. But it only applies if the appraised value exceeds the correct value by more than one-fourth for a residence homestead. That is a big miss, not a disagreement. And it is off the table completely if you already protested that value and the review board ruled on it after a hearing, or if you settled with the district in writing, which includes taking an informal offer. And if you do win, the statute hits you with a late-correction penalty of 10 percent of the taxes on the corrected value. So the people this actually helps are the ones who never filed, or who filed and never got a hearing on the merits.

So run the numbers before you file. If the district has you at $600,000 and the January comps say $450,000, that clears the one-fourth bar and the math probably still works even after the penalty. If they have you 8 percent high, it does not, and you would be spending a month on something the statute will not let you fix.

For most people the honest answer is that this is 2027 homework, and that is fine, because the file you build now is better than the one you throw together in April. Save the January closings in your subdivision. Photograph the roof and the foundation cracks and the kitchen you have been meaning to redo. Get the bids while contractors are not busy. Then when the notice shows up next spring you are not starting from zero, you are just filing. That is not that hard right.

The complete guide to property tax protests in Austin covers the hearing side of this, informal versus ARB and what to expect in the room, and the broader Austin property tax guide covers rates and exemptions.

Start with a real market value

Every one of these checks runs on the same input, which is an honest number for what your home would actually sell for. Not the district’s model, and not an automated estimate trained on the whole country. Actual closings, in your subdivision, adjusted for the things that make your house different.

That is the thing we can do that a national website cannot, because we are in the MLS every day and we know which of those sales had a $20,000 concession hiding behind the price.

Want a second set of eyes on your number?

If you want to know whether your assessment is defensible, the starting point is a real market value for your specific house, and that is something I will put together for you. Send me your address through my page here and I will pull the January closings around you and tell you honestly whether you have a case. Sometimes the answer is that the district got you about right, and I would rather tell you that than watch you spend a spring on a hearing you were never going to win.

At Neuhaus Realty Group we do this for clients and for people who are not clients yet, because a homeowner who knows their real number makes better decisions about everything else too. Be safe, be good, and be nice to people.