Governor Abbott Slashed Your Property Taxes Eight Times, Lowering Them by 60%

Texas property tax statements now carry a sentence the Legislature wrote into law: “Because of action by the Texas Legislature, your tax bill has been lowered by” a stated dollar amount. Many homeowners read that line, glance down at the total, and laugh. The total is bigger than it was ten years ago. Both observations are true, and the conventional wisdom about Greg Abbott depends on never setting them side by side.

A tax bill is the product of two numbers, a rate and a base. Picture a trucking company that cuts its fuel cost per mile by a fifth and then doubles its fleet size. Its fuel bill goes up. No accountant would conclude that diesel got more expensive. Texas property taxes have behaved the same way over the last decade, and the fleet here is the entire state.

In 2014, the year Abbott was elected, the Texas Comptroller put the market value of all property in the state at $2.522 trillion. By 2025, it was $5.673 trillion, up 125%. The single-family slice alone grew from $1.085 trillion to $2.999 trillion, a gain of 176%, partly because existing homes appreciated and partly because Texas added more than 4 million residents and built houses to hold them. Over the same years, total property tax levies from schools, cities, counties and special districts rose from $49.11 billion to $89.45 billion, or 82%. Those are levies, the amounts billed, rather than cash collected, but the bill is what a homeowner feels. Critics quote that 82%. It is real. It is also a good deal smaller than 125%.

Divide one number by the other, and the trend runs the other way. In 2014, Texas governments levied about $1.95 for every $100 of market value in the state. In 2025, they levied about $1.58. That is a 19% decline in the share of Texas property wealth that government claims each year. Does a 19% decline count as a tax cut? If the question is how heavily Texas taxes property, rather than how much property Texas happens to have, I can’t think of a better measure.

A second entry in the Comptroller’s ledger shows where much of the relief went. Every year it records two figures for Texas property: what the property is worth on the market and what remains to be taxed once exemptions and appraisal caps are subtracted. In 2014 the gap between those numbers was about $499 billion. By 2025 it had grown to $1.556 trillion, more than three times as large. Taxable value covered 80% of market value when Abbott took office and covers about 73% today. Even measured against that shrinking taxable base, the levy rate fell, from 2.43% to 2.17%.

The aggregate also hides a sharper pattern. Property taxes in Texas come from two kinds of government. School districts operate under a funding formula the Legislature writes, and the state pays into, while cities, counties, hospital districts and utility districts set their own budgets. The school levy grew 55%, from $26.8 billion to $41.7 billion. Everything else grew 114%, from $22.3 billion to $47.8 billion. Measured against property values, the school tax fell from $10.62 per $1,000 of value to $7.34, down 31%. The local share barely moved, slipping from $8.85 to $8.42. The lever Austin holds came down by nearly a third, while the lever held by city councils and commissioners courts stayed roughly where it was.

That decline was legislated one session at a time. In 2015, Abbott’s first year, voters raised the school homestead exemption from $15,000 to $25,000. In 2019, he signed House Bill 3, which used state money to buy down school maintenance and operations rates and required them to fall automatically as values climbed, along with Senate Bill 2, which cut the revenue growth a city or county could take without an election from 8% to 3.5%. The exemption rose to $40,000 in 2022. In 2023, it jumped to $100,000, paired with another 10.7 cents of rate compression, in a package the governor’s budget office valued at more than $18 billion. Last year lawmakers raised it again, to $140,000, and lifted the combined exemption for seniors and disabled homeowners to $200,000; voters ratified both changes in November. By the governor’s own accounting, school district tax rates have fallen by more than a third since 2015.

Aggregates can still mislead, so take a single house. Suppose a Texan owned a $200,000 home when Abbott was elected, and suppose it appreciated only as fast as consumer prices, which rose about 36% between 2014 and 2025. That makes it a $272,164 house today, the identical home in real terms. In 2014, after the $15,000 exemption, $185,000 of it was taxable at a statewide average school rate near 1.32%, for a school bill of about $2,451. In 2025, after the $140,000 exemption, $132,164 is taxable at roughly 1.01%, or about $1,337. That is 45% lower in nominal dollars. Convert the 2025 bill back into 2014 dollars, and it comes to $983, a real reduction of about 60%. Double the starting price and the cut shrinks without disappearing: a house worth $400,000 in 2014 sees its school bill fall about 20% in nominal terms and about 41% in real terms.

Houses did not politely track inflation, of course. According to Texas Realtors, the statewide median sale price went from $185,900 at the end of 2014 to $335,000 in 2025, a gain of 80%. So run the same arithmetic on the median house. Its school bill comes to roughly $2,263 in 2014 and $1,973 in 2025. That estimate ignores the 10% annual cap on homestead appraisals, which can only lower the taxable figure. The house is worth 80% more, and its school tax is 13% smaller in plain dollars and about 36% smaller once inflation is counted. This comparison should settle the matter, because it supports the critics’ premise. Values soared. The school tax fell anyway.

Why, then, does the total on the statement keep climbing? Look at the other lines. A homeowner in a fast-growing suburb may owe a city, a county, a community college, a hospital district and a municipal utility district, and as a group those governments more than doubled their levies while the state was cutting. Abbott has argued for years that local officials soaked up state relief by raising their own taxes, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has tracked tax increases city by city, has backed his plan to limit local spending growth and let voters force tax-cut elections. That, as I read it, is the point of the disclosure line: it tells the taxpayer which government shrank its claim, and the rest of the statement shows which ones grew.

Critics on the left and some on the right offer a more careful objection. Homestead exemptions, they say, simply shift the load onto renters and employers, who cannot claim them, and the Tax Foundation has urged Texas to favor rate compression over exemptions for that reason. The objection would carry more weight if Texas had relied on exemptions alone. It has not. Compression lowers the school rate on every class of property, including apartment complexes and machine shops, which is why a commercial building’s school rate has fallen by the same third as a home’s. Small firms got a separate break in 2025, when the business personal property exemption jumped from $2,500 to $125,000.

Texas Policy Research calls the state’s approach a treadmill. Of the $51 billion the Legislature set aside for property tax relief in the current two-year budget, about $34.7 billion simply maintains rate compression enacted since 2019 and $9.8 billion maintains earlier exemptions, leaving roughly $6.5 billion in genuinely new relief. Read carefully, that looks to me like an argument for Abbott rather than against him. A one-time rebate costs nothing to keep. A permanent rate cut on a growing base costs more each year because the state replaces more local tax dollars. The Texas Tribune estimated that the 2025 exemption increase alone would have saved the owner of a typical $302,000 home about $490 in school taxes, and that money never appears in anybody’s levy total because it was never levied in the first place, so the critics who count only levies will simply never see it.

Abbott’s campaign for a fourth term treats the job as half finished, which is probably the right instinct. He wants local spending held to population growth plus inflation or 3.5%, whichever is lower, a two-thirds vote of the electorate before any local government can raise property taxes, a 3% appraisal cap that reaches rental and commercial property, and a constitutional amendment letting Texans abolish the school property tax on homesteads entirely. Every one of those proposals aims away from the Capitol. The governor has spent a decade shrinking the portion of the bill he can reach. The portion he cannot reach is set each summer by commissioners courts and city councils, at budget hearings that almost nobody attends, and the taxpayers who keep blaming Austin for what they owe are mostly sending their complaints to the wrong adress.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.