Thanks to a $32 billion budget surplus, the Texas legislature has come up with a plan that will reduce property taxes for residential and commercial properties.

However, before this tax cut goes into effect, voters must approve a constitutional amendment in the November 2023 election. Here is the wording of the proposed amendment. The Texas Tribune provided this detailed explanation of how and why these tax cuts are possible.

This will be great for my family and my son because property taxes have been going UP since half of the country has moved to Texas. Demand for houses caused property values to rise without doing anything to improve the property.

People from California and states who had expensive houses sold them and brought buckets of money and purchased houses in Texas for much less, but paid more than the asking price the minute the listings hit the internet. Many houses in Austin were selling the same day they went on the market.

In 2022, property values in Texas rose by an average of 18%. This increase in property values generated an additional $7.2 billion in property tax revenue for the state. Texas doesn’t have an income tax, but it has a sales tax. Sales increased so much that the state ended up with a budget surplus, a good problem to have in today’s economy.

The bill includes a number of provisions that are designed to provide relief to homeowners and renters, including:

• A $100,000 homestead exemption for homeowners. This means that the first $100,000 of the value of a home is exempt from property taxes.
• A 10.7-cent reduction in the school property tax rate. This will save homeowners an average of $1,300 per year.
• A pilot program that limits appraisal growth to 20% on non-homesteaded properties worth $5 million or less. This will help to prevent property taxes from rising too quickly for businesses and other non-homesteaded properties. This will expire unless it is renewed.