Your 2026 Travis County property tax bill is being set right now

The Austin City Council locked in the city’s 2026 property tax rate on August 12. It landed at $0.579948 per $100 of value, up from $0.524017 the year before, which is a 10.7 percent jump in the rate itself. Leander ISD adopted on August 17, Lake Travis ISD on August 19, and the rest of them, the county, Austin ISD, Eanes, Central Health, ACC, have until the end of September. So part of your 2026 Travis County property tax bill is already carved in stone and the rest is still being argued about in meetings you could literally walk into this week.

Your bill shows up in October and by then it is just a piece of paper telling you what already happened. But you can run the number right now, today, with what is public. Lets do that.

Travis County certified its 2026 rates on August 5. The no-new-revenue rate came in at $0.378179 and the voter-approval rate at $0.386210, both signed off by Jessica Rio, the County Executive for Planning and Budget, in the county’s own Notice About 2026 Tax Rate. That second number matters more than people realize. The voter-approval rate is the ceiling. The county cannot go above it without asking you at the ballot box, so whatever they adopt in September is going to land at or under $0.386210.

Ok so here is why I am writing this in August instead of October. Every spring I get calls from folks who opened their appraisal notice, saw the value jumped, protested or didn’t, and then quietly assumed that was the whole ballgame. It is not. Your value is half the equation and the rate is the other half, and the rate half is being decided right now while almost nobody is watching.

What is already locked, and what is still moving

Your certified value is done. The appraisal district finished its roll in July, the review board has heard what it is going to hear, and unless you are still sitting in a formal proceeding, that number is set for 2026. The rates are the part still in play.

Texas Tax Code Section 26.05 says a taxing unit has to adopt its rate before the later of September 30 or the 60th day after it gets the certified appraisal roll. And there is a nice little backstop buried in that same section, if a unit blows the deadline entirely, its rate defaults to the lower of that year’s no-new-revenue rate or last year’s adopted rate. That almost never happens. But I like that it exists.

Every major Travis County taxing unit, and where it stands today

I pulled last year’s adopted rates straight out of the Travis County Tax Office rate-history file, which is a spreadsheet going back to 1990 that almost nobody outside the business ever opens, and matched them against what each unit has actually done for 2026 so far (yes, I spent an evening on a county spreadsheet and a 187 page exemption PDF, and yes, my wife has questions about how I choose to spend my time). Here is the whole picture in one place.

2025 rates from the Travis County Tax Office rate history. 2026 City of Austin rate from the city’s adopted tax rate page. Lake Travis ISD and Leander ISD rates from their own board actions. County ceiling from the county rate notice certified August 5, 2026.

Fair warning on that third column, it moved under my feet while I was writing this. Several of those rates got set in the two weeks before this published and more will land through September. The Travis County Tax Office says all rates should be posted by October 3, so if you are reading this later in the fall, go check the county’s own truth in taxation page for the version that is actually current.

Look at the school district column for a second, because that is where the money actually is. Austin ISD is the single biggest line on the bill by a wide margin, roughly 40 percent of the total for a typical Austin homeowner, and it is one of the ones still undecided. If you live in Lakeway or out toward Bee Cave like I do, Lake Travis ISD at its newly adopted $1.0329 is doing most of the damage on your bill, not the city line everybody complains about. And credit where it is due, that is actually a small cut from last year’s $1.0397. That is worth knowing before you show up angry at the wrong meeting right.

The exemptions come off first, and they are not all the same

This is the part that trips people up, because every entity gets to pick its own homestead exemption and they do not match. I went through the appraisal district’s 2026 exemption listing, which is a 187 page PDF generated on July 19, and pulled the general homestead numbers for the entities most of you are paying.

Source: Travis Central Appraisal District 2026 Exemption Listing Report, generated July 19, 2026.

The $140,000 school exemption is the one that moved recently. Texas voters passed Proposition 13 on November 4, 2025, which took the school district homestead exemption from $100,000 up to $140,000. If you are 65 or older the state piece goes to $200,000, and several districts stack a local amount on top of that.

Lets run it on a $500,000 house

Say you own a home in the city of Austin, in Austin ISD, valued at $500,000, and your homestead exemption is on file. Here is the actual math, entity by entity, using the city’s adopted 2026 rate, last year’s rate everywhere it has not been set yet, and the county sitting at its ceiling.

That same house with no homestead exemption on file anywhere comes to $10,563.91. So the exemption is worth $2,384.63 a year to that owner, and I promise you there are people reading this who have owned a house since 2023 and never filed the form.

Thaler and Sunstein’s whole point in Nudge is that whatever the default is, that is what most people end up with, because opting in takes a little effort that nobody ever budgets for. A property tax exemption is exactly that. It is free, it is permanent once it is on, and the default is off. Go check yours. If it is not there, our Texas homestead exemption guide walks through the filing, and we also wrote up the deadlines new buyers keep missing, which is a real problem in a market where people close in December and forget about it by February.

Where the county is probably going to land

Travis County adopted $0.375845 last year. Its 2026 no-new-revenue rate is $0.378179 and its ceiling is $0.386210. So the realistic range for the county line on your October bill is somewhere in that neighborhood, and even at the very top of it the county is a smaller piece of your bill than most people assume. On the $500,000 example above, going from the no-new-revenue rate all the way up to the ceiling is a difference of about $32 for the year.

Meanwhile the city already moved almost 5.6 cents. That is not a small thing, but I want to be honest about what it means, because a rate going up 10.7 percent does not automatically mean your bill goes up 10.7 percent. Rates and values move against each other, that is the part nobody ever explains. The city’s own budget release put the effect on a typical homeowner at $9.48 a month, or $113.76 for the year. Whether that matches your house depends entirely on what happened to your value, which is why you have to run your own numbers instead of reading a headline (mine included, go check the math).

What you can actually do between now and October

Not a lot, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The value fight is over for this year. That is not a satisfying answer right, but it is the true one, and there are still three things live.

First, verify your exemptions are actually on the property. Not that you filed. That it is on. Second, the rate hearings are public and they are on the calendar in September, and school board and commissioners court meetings are the least attended public meetings in America right now. Third, if the number that comes in October genuinely does not match what your house is worth, start building your 2027 protest file now, while the comparable sales are fresh. Our Austin property tax protest guide and the Travis County walkthrough both cover how to assemble that, and if you are in a MUD or PID there is a whole other set of line items that catches people off guard.

And one more thing, because this is where most of the frustration actually comes from. An assessed value and a market value are two different animals that happen to be wearing the same suit. For what it is worth, the median single family home in Travis County sold for $525,000 in July, on 1,315 sales with an average of 55 days on market, according to our own MLS-fed market data. That is up about 0.8 percent from July of last year. Basically flat. So if your assessment moved a lot more than that, that is worth a conversation.

At Neuhaus Realty Group we are pulling real comps out of the MLS every day anyway, so the honest version of this is that you should know what your house would actually sell for before you decide whether the county got it wrong. Those are two different questions and people mash them together constantly.

Want to know what your house is actually worth

If the October bill lands and the value on it does not feel like it matches reality, the first thing to figure out is what your house would really sell for today, not what the appraisal district thinks. That is a comp question and it takes about ten minutes to answer properly.

I have been doing this in west Austin and the Hill Country for a long time now, and I will tell you straight when your assessment looks about right, even though telling you that earns me nothing. Lets grab coffee, or just reach out here and we will pull the comps and look at it together. Be safe, be good, and be nice to people.

Ed Neuhaus is the Broker and Owner of Neuhaus Realty Group.