Last updated: September 2026
Texas has no state income tax, so property tax funds schools and local government — and exemptions are the main lever you have to lower your bill. Here's every homestead, age, disability, and veteran exemption on the books, in dollar terms.
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If a home is your principal residence as of January 1 of the tax year, Texas requires every school district to exempt $140,000 of its appraised value from school taxes (Tax Code §11.13(b)). That's the exemption behind the "homestead" checkbox in our property tax calculator.
The math: if your home appraises at $350,000, the school district taxes you on $210,000, not $350,000. Other taxing units — county, city, hospital district, MUD — aren't required to honor the $140,000 figure; they tax the full appraised value unless they've adopted a local option exemption (see below) or you qualify for one of the other exemptions on this page.
You must own and occupy the home as your principal residence — a second home, rental property, or an LLC-owned property doesn't qualify.
Once your homestead exemption is in place, Texas caps how much your appraised value — not your tax bill, and not market value — can rise for tax purposes: 10% per year, plus the value of any new improvements (a pool, an addition), even if the market is running hotter than that. The cap starts the year after your exemption is first granted, so a brand-new purchase isn't capped in year one.
On top of the general $140,000, school districts must exempt an additional $60,000 of value for homeowners who are 65 or older, or who meet Social Security's definition of disabled (Tax Code §11.13(c)–(d)). That's a recent jump — Texas voters approved Proposition 11 in November 2025, raising this exemption from $10,000 to $60,000, retroactive to the 2025 tax year. Combined with the general exemption, that's $200,000 in school-tax exemptions for an eligible senior or disabled homeowner.
There's a second benefit that's easy to miss: once you turn 65, your school taxes are frozen at whatever they were the year you qualified (a "tax ceiling" under Tax Code §11.26) — they can't go up from natural appraisal increases afterward, only if you add improvements. A surviving spouse 55 or older can keep that ceiling after the homeowner passes. There's also a separate tax deferral option for seniors and disabled homeowners who need to postpone (not eliminate) a tax bill — see our full over-65 tax ceiling & deferral guide for how the ceiling transfers when you move and how the deferral actually works.
A veteran with a 100% VA disability rating (or individual unemployability), or the surviving spouse of a veteran who qualified and hasn't remarried, gets a full exemption from property tax on their homestead under Tax Code §11.131. Unlike the general homestead exemption, this one applies to every taxing unit — county, city, school, MUD, all of it — not just schools. File Form 50-135 with your county appraisal district.
Veterans with a disability rating under 100% still qualify for a partial exemption under Tax Code §11.22 — and unlike the homestead-only exemptions above, this one can apply to any one property you own, not just your primary residence.
| VA disability rating | Exemption amount |
|---|---|
| 10%–29% | $5,000 |
| 30%–49% | $7,500 |
| 50%–69% | $10,000 |
| 70%–100% | $12,000 |
Veterans 65 or older with at least a 10% rating, veterans totally blind in one or both eyes, or veterans who've lost use of one or more limbs also qualify for the $12,000 tier regardless of their rated percentage. The surviving spouse of a service member killed in action gets a full homestead exemption if they haven't remarried, or the $5,000 tier on any one property owned.
Counties, cities, and special districts aren't required to offer more, but many choose to: they can adopt an optional homestead exemption of up to 20% of appraised value, with a $5,000 minimum, applied against their own portion of your tax bill. Whether your county or city does this — and at what percentage — varies, so check with your appraisal district. Our calculator's "local optional exemption" field lets you plug in your area's actual figure.
File Form 50-114 (general/senior/disabled homestead) or Form 50-135 (100% disabled veteran) with your county appraisal district — Harris County uses hcad.org, Dallas dallascad.org, and so on for each county. The statutory deadline is before May 1 of the tax year (Tax Code §11.43(d)), though chief appraisers can grant good-cause extensions, and homestead exemptions can generally be filed retroactively for up to two prior tax years if you missed the window. There's no fee, and no company needs to be paid to file this for you.
The exemption doesn't carry over automatically when you buy a new home — you have to file again at the new address. Renting out a room or the whole home can jeopardize your exemption if it's no longer your principal residence. And exemptions are separate from the property tax protest process — see our guide to protesting your appraisal if you think the value itself, not just the exemptions applied to it, is too high.
Two situations this page only touches on briefly: if you inherited the home without a will or a formal probate, see our heir property & inherited homestead guide — you likely still qualify for the homestead exemption. And if the property is farm, ranch, or timber land, or under wildlife management, a completely different valuation method usually applies instead of these exemptions — see our agricultural & wildlife exemptions guide.
See what these exemptions actually save you in dollars.
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