The Texas School Tax Ceiling: What It Freezes, and What It Doesn't

Bill, not value

It's easy to assume a “freeze” means your home's appraised value stops changing. It doesn't. Your county appraisal district can still reappraise your home higher every year. What the ceiling locks in is the school district's tax bill — the dollar figure at the bottom of that portion of your statement stays at or below the amount from your first qualifying year, even as the underlying value moves.

Mandatory for schools, optional everywhere else

Every Texas school district must apply the ceiling to qualifying 65+ and disabled homesteads — it's not optional at that level. County, city, and junior-college taxing units are different: each one decides for itself whether to adopt a ceiling at all.

If your county hasn't adopted a ceiling, your county tax bill can keep rising with your appraised value even while your school tax bill stays capped. Check your county comparison pagefor which local taxing units we've confirmed.

When the ceiling itself gets recalculated

The ceiling isn't always a single fixed number forever. State law provides for it to be recalculated when certain district-wide exemption amounts or compressed tax rates change.

We haven't independently confirmed the exact recalculation arithmetic against a specific appraisal district, so we're not publishing a worked dollar example until that's verified. If your bill changed and you're trying to understand why, see why a ceilinged bill can still rise.

Ceiling vs. exemption vs. the appraisal cap

These are three separate mechanisms that often get conflated. The exemption (see our over-65 exemption page) reduces the taxable value used to calculate your bill. The ceilingcaps the resulting dollar amount of the school bill itself. A separate residence-homestead appraisal limitation caps how much your appraised value can rise year over year — we haven't verified the current percentage for that limitation against a primary source, so we're not stating a number here. All three can apply to the same homestead at once, each doing a different job.

Surviving spouses

A surviving spouse can continue the same ceiling if they were 55 or older on the date the qualifying spouse died and the home was their residence homestead at that date.

Full detail on this rule, including how it interacts with other surviving-spouse programs, is on our surviving spouse page.

Moving to a new home

The ceiling doesn't automatically follow you to a new address, but a percentage of the tax reduction it represents can transfer if you file the right paperwork. See our ceiling transfer page for how that works.