Nearly 4 in 10 Texas homesteads pay no school property taxes - NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

The findings come from Senate Local Government Committee Chair Paul Bettencourt, whose office spent about four months pulling property tax bill data from offices covering all 254 Texas counties. Bettencourt called it the first comprehensive statewide analysis of its kind. The shift reflects years of lawmakers expanding the homestead exemption and compressing school tax rates.

For Lubbock homeowners, that context matters. Property taxes here fund Lubbock ISD and the surrounding rural districts, and any statewide compression of school tax rates touches every household on the tax roll, whether they benefit directly or not. Homeowners who have aged into exemption thresholds or qualify through disability have seen some of the biggest relief.

The people who feel this most are retirees on fixed incomes who have owned their homes for decades. More than six in 10 elderly or disabled Texas homesteads now carry no school tax bill at all, a significant financial cushion for folks in Lubbock neighborhoods where longtime homeowners often outlast the mortgages on their houses by 20 years or more.

Texas has 254 counties, more than any other state. That geographic scale made Bettencourt's data collection as logistically complicated as the tax system it was trying to measure.