Your property tax bill is your home’s assessed value times a rate you can’t change, so the assessment is the number to fight. Pull your property record, check the square footage, bedrooms, and basement against your actual house, and appeal any error before the deadline on your assessment notice.
Assessors value whole neighborhoods at once from records, recent sales, and the outside of each house. A bedroom that doesn’t exist or a basement logged as finished can sit in your file for years.
The National Taxpayers Union Foundation estimates that fewer than 5% of taxpayers challenge their assessments, though most who come prepared win at least a partial cut.
An error costs you every year it stays. Say your record credits the house with 300 square feet it doesn’t have, priced at $150 a square foot. That’s $45,000 of value that isn’t there. At a 1.5% tax rate, you pay $675 a year for it, or $6,750 over a decade before values rise.
Where yearly increases are capped, a win also lowers the base. Texas caps a homestead’s appraised value at 10% above the prior year’s, so a lower value this year means a lower cap every year after.
- Find the deadline on your notice first, because it’s short. In Texas, the usual cutoff is 30 days after the notice is mailed or May 15, whichever is later, and a late protest gets a hearing only for good cause.
- Look up your home on the assessor’s website (in Texas, the appraisal district’s) and check every detail against the house.
- Lead with facts. A survey, a floor plan, or photos of a bare basement prove an error, and recent sales of similar nearby homes for less than your assessed value come next. Saying the tax is too high won’t count, because boards rule on value.
- Start with the informal review. It’s usually a form, a call, or a short meeting with the assessor’s staff, and it’s often free. Staff can settle a documented error there, with no formal hearing.
If you’d rather hand it off, Ownwell handles appeals in the states it covers for a share of the savings and charges nothing if your bill doesn’t drop.
Make it a yearly habit to open your property record the day the notice arrives, while there’s still time to fix what’s wrong.
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