Property Taxes by City in DFW: How the Rates Actually Compare (2026)

Every relocating buyer runs this comparison manually and most of them run it wrong, because they compare city tax rates and the city is usually the smallest part of the bill.

This post will not hand you a table of rates by city. It will do something more useful: show you how the bill is assembled, explain why the table you find elsewhere is probably out of date, and get you to the authoritative number for any specific address in about five minutes.

Every adopted rate in Texas is reported to the Comptroller and published in its tax rates and levies data. That is the record a blog table is a stale copy of, including this one.

How a Texas Tax Bill Is Actually Built

There is no single “property tax rate” for a city. There is a stack of independent taxing units, each of which sets its own rate every year, and your bill is the sum of them.

Two consequences follow immediately. First, comparing city rates compares the second-largest component and ignores the largest. Second, because the school district boundary and the city boundary are not the same shape, two addresses in the same city can sit in different school districts and have genuinely different bills. That is not an edge case here. Carrollton spans three districts. Sachse spans three. McKinney contains Frisco ISD addresses.

Why I Am Not Giving You a Rate Table

Three reasons, and they are the same reasons the tables you find elsewhere mislead people.

1. Rates are adopted annually. Every taxing unit sets a new rate each year, typically in late summer. A table published in one year is wrong by the next, and most of the ones circulating are several years old with no date on them.
2. A city-level figure hides the special districts. The single biggest variable between two new houses in the same city is often a PID assessment that a city-level table cannot represent.
3. The exemptions differ. Local optional homestead exemptions are set independently by each city and county, so two identical rates can produce different bills.

A number you can verify in five minutes beats a table you have to trust. Here is the five minutes.

Where to Get the Real Number in Five Minutes

1. Find the property on the county appraisal district site. Collin CAD, Dallas CAD, Denton CAD, Rockwall CAD or Kaufman CAD, depending on where the property sits. Search by address.
2. Read the list of taxing units on the property record. This is the part people skip and it is the whole answer. It will name every unit that taxes that specific parcel, including any MUD or special district.
3. Look up the current adopted rate for each uniton the county’s truth-in-taxation portal. Texas requires counties to publish these, along with each unit’s proposed rates and hearing dates.
4. Add them up, then apply the exemptions. Subtract the school district homestead exemption and any local optional exemptions from the assessed value before multiplying. The 2026 figures are in the homestead exemption guide.
5. Ask separately about PID assessments. A PID assessment may be billed alongside your taxes without being a tax rate as such. Ask the title company and the HOA directly. What a PID actually is.

Do this for the two or three specific houses you are seriously considering rather than for every city in the metro. It is a decision tool, not a research project.

The Shape of the Metro

Without quoting rates that will be stale by next autumn, some patterns hold consistently enough to be worth knowing when you are narrowing a search:

• Newer outer-ring cities generally carry higher combined rates than established inner-ring ones. They are financing new infrastructure and new schools against a tax base that is still being built. This is the single most reliable pattern in the metro and it directly offsets part of the price advantage that draws buyers out there.
• Established cities with mature tax bases and commercial property tend to sit lower. Commercial and industrial property carries part of the load, so the residential rate does not have to.
• The school district is where the real variance is. Two cities with similar municipal rates can differ meaningfully once the district is included.
• MUD and PID developments are the outliers in both directions. A MUD in the early years of its debt can push a total well above anything a city-level table would suggest, and MUD rates typically decline as the debt is retired.

The practical implication for anyone shopping the affordable outer ring: the price saving is real, and part of it is spent on the rate. Model it before you commit. Where the affordable suburbs actually are.

Two Houses, Same Price, Different Bills

Five reasons this happens, all of them common:

1. Different school districts inside the same city. Extremely common in this metro.
2. One has a PID or MUD and the other does not. The single largest source of surprise.
3. Different exemption status. A seller who is over 65 has a frozen school ceiling that will not transfer to you. How the ceiling works.
4. Different capped values. A long-held home has a capped appraised value well below market. Yours resets on purchase. The cap, explained.
5. One is newly built and assessed as a lot. The first-year bill on new construction is frequently a fraction of what it will be, which produces an escrow shortage and a payment jump in year two. Why your payment jumped.

What to Do With This When You Shop

• Never budget from a listing’s tax figure.It usually reflects the current owner’s exemptions and their capped value, and it is frequently the single most misleading number on the page.
• Ask your lender to escrow against the reassessed value, particularly on new construction. Some will; it prevents the year-two shock.
• File your homestead exemption immediately after closing. It reduces the bill and starts the ten percent cap running.
• Protest in your first spring.A recent purchase price is the strongest evidence of market value that exists, and it works in your favour if you bought below the district’s estimate. How to protest.
• If you are selling, run the after-tax proceeds properly in the net proceeds calculator, since taxes are prorated to the closing date.

One last framing that helps people coming from high-income-tax states. The Texas trade is a low tax on what you earn and a high tax on what you own. Whether that is a good trade for you is arithmetic, not ideology, and it is worth doing rather than assuming. The full swap, modelled.