Texans hate property taxes. An August 2025 UT-Texas poll found that 85% of Texans thought further reducing property taxes was either extremely or very important, including 55% who said it was extremely important. More than half of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents said it was either “extremely” or “very’ important. By 2023, voters’ angst over property taxes was reaching a boiling point. In response, the Republican state leadership made reducing property taxes a priority for the 2023 legislative session. The result was a bipartisan bill – SB2. It passed the Texas Senate unanimously and the Texas House133-4. In the Senate, it was co-sponsored by Republican Paul Bettencourt and Democrat Carol Alvarado.

Fundamentally, the bill shifted a portion of school funding from local property taxes to state revenues. It accomplished this by increasing the school homestead exemption and requiring school districts to reduce their tax rates according to certain formulas (known as “compression”) and then replacing the lost property tax collections with state revenues. The impact varied based on taxpayers’ circumstances, but a typical Texas homeowner saw a reduction on the order of 25–30% in the school portion of their property-tax bill. By the 2025 legislative session, primarily because of rising property values, the pressure was on to do more.  The Legislature responded with another round of school property-tax relief. It increased the mandatory homestead exemption again and imposed additional tax-rate compression.

As in 2023, the state assumed more of the cost of public education so that local school districts could collect less from property owners.  ese reforms also received widespread bipartisan support, and the final version passed both houses unanimously. A typical Texas homeowner saw an additional 15-20% reduction in their school tax bill as a result. Of course, school property taxes are only a portion of a homeowner’s total property-tax bill, albeit the largest portion for most homeowners. So, when the State reduced the school-tax portion by about 35–40%, that translated into only about a 15–20% reduction in the overall property-tax bill, assuming—and this is important—the taxes imposed by the other local taxing entities remained unchanged. They did not. To the contrary, many counties and cities saw an opportunity to