200,000 Tarrant County Homes May Have Been Overtaxed This Year — Here's What Every Homeowner in Southlake, Grapevine, Colleyville, Trophy Club, and Westlake Needs to Know

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If you own a home anywhere in Tarrant County, there's a property tax story this year that deserves your full attention, even though the official protest deadline has already passed. Understanding what happened sets you up to act smarter next year — and right now, while the controversy is still fresh, is the best time to get educated.

What Actually Happened

In 2024, the Tarrant Appraisal District (TAD) board adopted a new reappraisal plan: instead of reassessing residential properties every year, TAD would only reappraise every two years, freezing most residential market values at their 2024 levels for the 2025 tax year. The idea, according to TAD, was to ease the administrative burden and provide a measure of predictability for homeowners.

In practice, local tax consultants and at least one Tarrant County commissioner have argued the plan backfired. Speaking at a county commissioners court meeting, officials revealed that the market value of roughly 190,000 homes would likely have decreased had TAD reappraised this year — but because those values were frozen at the higher 2024 levels, owners didn't get the benefit of declining market conditions. Tax assessor-collector Rick Barnes was blunt about it: his advice to every Tarrant County property owner is to appeal their value, every single year, regardless of what the freeze technically allows.

This matters for our communities specifically. Southlake, Westlake, Colleyville, Trophy Club, and the Carroll ISD and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD footprint sit squarely within TAD's jurisdiction, and many of these neighborhoods carry some of the highest assessed values in the county — meaning even a modest percentage error in valuation translates into real dollars.

The Numbers That Matter

Tarrant County's combined effective property tax rate generally runs in the 2.1% to 2.4% range once you stack county, school district, city, and special district levies together. On a home valued at $1.2 million — not unusual in parts of Southlake or Colleyville — a 10% reduction in appraised value can mean well over $2,000 in annual savings, recurring every year going forward because of how the homestead cap works. For Westlake's ultra-luxury estates, where values regularly exceed $3 million, the stakes are correspondingly higher.

For 2026, the math behind your bill changed in a few important ways:

• The school district homestead exemption now reduces your taxable value by $140,000 for primary residences (up from $100,000), with $200,000 for qualifying seniors.
• Tarrant County and the JPS Health Network both offer a 20% homestead exemption on top of the school district break.
• Veterans with a 100% service-connected disability rating continue to receive a full property tax exemption.
• The 10% annual homestead appraisal cap still limits how fast your assessed value can climb year over year, regardless of what TAD's mass appraisal model says your home is "worth."

If You Missed This Year's Deadline

The 2026 protest deadline was May 15 (or 30 days after your notice was mailed, whichever came later), so if you didn't file, you're locked into this year's value. That said, there are still a few things worth doing immediately:

1. Confirm your homestead exemption is actually on file. This is shockingly common to miss, especially after a refinance, a name change on title, or a recent move. You can check your status directly at tad.org using your address or account number.
2. Pull your Notice of Appraised Value and read the new format carefully. TAD redesigned the notice this year specifically to make the breakdown between market value, assessed value, and exemptions easier to parse — take the ten minutes to actually go through it line by line.
3. Start a file now for next year's protest. Photograph any deferred maintenance, foundation issues (common in our area's expansive clay soils), or storm damage while it's fresh. Comparable sales data and photographic evidence are the two things that move the needle most in a protest, and gathering them in real time beats scrambling next April.

Why the Freeze Cuts Both Ways

It's worth understanding that a frozen appraised value is not the same as a frozen tax bill. Cities, school districts, and counties still set their tax rates independently each year, which means your bill can rise even if your home's assessed value doesn't move an inch. This is especially relevant for homeowners in high-performing school districts like Carroll ISD and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, where strong academic ratings (Carroll ISD posted a 95 overall score in the 2025 TEA Accountability Ratings, among the highest in the Dallas-Fort Worth area) often come paired with correspondingly higher local tax rates to fund that performance.

What to Watch For Next

County commissioners have publicly pushed back on TAD's two-year reappraisal cycle, with at least one commissioner calling it "bad policy." Whether the appraisal district revisits the plan before the next cycle is worth following over the coming months, since any change would directly affect how — and how often — your home's value gets reassessed going forward.

In the meantime, the single best thing any homeowner in our area can do is treat the appeal process as an annual habit rather than a one-time event. Tax assessor-collector Rick Barnes' advice is worth repeating: appeal every year, because the appraisal district's mass-appraisal model can't account for the specific condition, location quirks, or deferred maintenance unique to your individual property — and nobody is going to make that case for you except you.