Harris County voted to raise its property tax rate in September and Mayor John Whitmire is expected to announce his plans for Houston’s tax rate this month.

What does that mean for your wallet? The calculator and tutorial below will help you find out. 

All you need is the appraised property value for the years you’re trying to compare. You can find that on the Harris Central Appraisal District website’s property records search page by typing in your address, name or account number. 

The property’s appraised value for the current year and the previous year will be under the ‘Valuations’ section. You also can view the property’s assessed value for each of the preceding five years by clicking ‘5-Year Value History.’

With the home’s appraised value in hand, get the current tax rate for whatever jurisdiction you are interested in, as well as the new or proposed rate. Existing rates for all jurisdictions applied to a property are found above the valuations section.

Let’s use Harris County as an example. 

Harris County’s overall property tax rate is composed of four rates: the county, the Harris County Flood Control District, the Port of Houston and the Harris Health hospital district. Together the four jurisdictions’ levies totaled 0.53029 for 2023; for the sake of simplicity, let’s call that 53 cents per $100 of assessed value.

Pending voter approval of the flood control district rate this November, the total county tax rate could jump to 0.60389, or 60.4 cents per $100 of assessed value. We’ll use these two tax rates as an example, but you could use any of the others to see how parts of your tax bill would change under different jurisdictions.

All you have to do now is plug the two appraised values and two tax rates you want to compare into the calculator.

Does the property have a homestead exemption? The standard homestead is 20 percent. In other words, the exemption reduces the taxable value of a property by 20 percent. If the property has a 20 percent homestead exemption, check that box and the calculator factors that in by multiplying the appraised value by 0.8.

The calculator also will divide the resulting taxable value by 100 – remember, the tax rate is X cents per $100 of assessed value.

Using last year’s overall Harris County tax rate on a home valued at $300,000, the calculation is as follows:

$300,000 x 0.8 ÷ 100 x 0.53 = $1,272. That $1,272 is the yearly property tax bill owed to Harris County.

To compare it to the new rate approved by Commissioners Court last month – again, assuming voters approve the increase for the flood control district – simply plug that new rate into the Year 2 portion of the calculator. And if the appraised value of the property also has changed, enter that, too.

For example, if a home originally assessed at $300,000 increases in value to $310,000 the following year and the rate increases to 60.4 cents per $100 of assessed value (again assuming the homestead exemption), the tax bill goes up almost $225.

Note: just because your property’s market value went up 20 percent, your tax bill won’t go up 20 percent. That is because the state caps the amount an appraised value can go up at 10 percent a year if a property has a homestead exemption.

There are other discounts, too. The one referenced earlier, the homestead exemption, can be used on any owner’s primary residence to lower its appraised value, which brings down the taxable value. Not everyone knows about it though, so it’s not always claimed.

You can learn how to claim yours here. 

Other exemptions available for certain groups include those for senior citizens and disabled veterans.

The post Will your property taxes go up next year? Use this simple calculator to find out.  appeared first on Houston Landing.