The appraisal district resets the value, and the owner has to answer it

What buying in Dallas actually involves

The property tax is the largest cost of owning here after the mortgage, and it is worked out unit by unit. A house in the City of Dallas and Dallas ISD pays five: Dallas County, the City, the school district, Dallas College and the Parkland Hospital District, and their 2025 rates add to 2.22671 per $100 of value. Each takes a homestead exemption off first, the school district a flat $140,000 and a further 10%, the other four 20% each, so on the $469,900 median house an owner who lives in it pays about $7,446 a year and a landlord about $10,463. The exemptions are not automatic: you apply to the Dallas Central Appraisal District, and in the year you buy you get a prorated one only if the seller had none. A house in Richardson ISD, in Collin or Denton County, or inside a public improvement district pays a different bill.

The value the rates are charged on is reset every year. The appraisal district mailed 788,553 notices for 2025 and received 230,276 protests, 180,733 of them on homes, in a season that runs from about the middle of April to 20 July; an owner has until 15 May, or 30 days after the notice arrives if that is later, to file one. On a homestead the taxable value may rise no more than 10% a year once the owner has held the exemption for a year, and the cap ends with the sale, so a buyer is taxed on the full value from the first bill and the seller's bill understates the buyer's.

Two things about the house itself matter more here than in most cities on this site. The roof is what the insurer prices: hail is the largest cause of paid homeowners losses in Texas, $4.93 billion of them in 2024, a policy's wind and hail deductible can be different from the rest of it, and as a roof ages some insurers switch to paying only its depreciated value, so the roof's age and the policy's terms belong in the offer. And the ground moves. Dallas County is heavy Blackland Prairie clay, which swells when it is wet and shrinks in drought, and a structural engineer's look at the slab or the piers, and at any record of past repairs, is worth paying for before the option period in the contract runs out.

The Trinity is the other map to read. The river runs through the city between levees first completed in 1932 and upgraded by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, twenty-three miles of them in the Dallas Floodway, with sumps and pump stations behind them for 51 square miles of watershed. Land behind a levee drains to a sump that a pump station has to empty in a storm, so the flood map for the exact address, and the price of a flood policy, are worth checking even where a lender does not require one. And the city's own map has holes in it: Highland Park and University Park, the Park Cities, and Cockrell Hill are separate towns that Dallas surrounds, with their own councils and tax rates, and a Dallas mailing address is not proof of a City of Dallas one.

Moving to Dallas: check these before you commit

• The appraisal district's value for the house, the protest deadline on this year's notice, and what the 10% homestead cap has done to the seller's bill, since the cap ends on the sale
• Which city, county, school district and public improvement district tax the address, from the appraisal district's record rather than the mailing address
• The roof's age, and whether the insurance policy pays replacement cost or depreciated value on it and what its wind and hail deductible is
• A structural engineer's look at the foundation, and any record of past repairs, on clay that swells and shrinks with the rain
• FEMA's flood map and the City's floodplain for the exact address, and how close the lot sits to the Trinity levees or a creek