Travis Bunn
Founder, AppealDesk · Published March 27, 2026 · Updated August 2, 2026
Enter your address to see if your home may be overassessed. Takes 60 seconds.
$49 flat fee · No percentage of savings · No hidden costs
Start your Texas appeal: Harris County · Dallas County · Travis County · Bexar County · Tarrant County · Collin County · Denton County · Fort Bend County · Williamson County · Montgomery County
Updated August 2026
Here is the question Texas homeowners with a mortgage ask after every successful protest: the Appraisal Review Board just knocked $40,000 off my value, so why is my payment the same in August? The answer is that Texas runs two calendars that were never designed to talk to each other. The protest calendar is set by the Texas Tax Code and finishes its work in summer. Your escrow account runs on a federal calendar set by RESPA, and it only reconciles once a year. A protest win travels from the ARB hearing room to your monthly mortgage statement in three separate hops, and each hop has its own clock.
This guide maps the full route: when each Texas deadline hits, when your lender actually pays the county, and the two federal rules you can use to pull your savings forward instead of waiting for them.
The Texas side is rigid. Appraisal districts must send a Notice of Appraised Value by April 1 for residence homesteads (May 1 for other property) under Tax Code Section 25.19. Your protest deadline is May 15, or 30 days after the district mailed your notice, whichever is later. ARB hearings run through the summer, with at least 15 days advance notice of your hearing date. Then, under Tax Code Section 31.01, tax bills go out around October 1, and under Section 31.02 the tax is delinquent if not paid before February 1. In practice your lender wires the county money from your escrow account in the window between October and January 31.
The escrow side is elastic. Under RESPA (12 CFR 1024.17), your servicer must analyze your escrow account once per escrow computation year. That computation year starts whenever your loan was set up or last analyzed, so it almost never aligns with the Texas tax calendar. The analysis looks backward at what was actually disbursed and forward at what the servicer expects to disburse next.
Put the two together and you get the lag: an ARB order signed in July does not change any number your servicer looks at until the county produces a bill in October, and the bill does not change your monthly payment until the next analysis after your servicer pays it.
Suppose a Harris County homeowner gets an April notice valuing her homestead at $400,000, protests by May 15, and the ARB signs an order in July lowering the value to $360,000. At the statewide average effective rate of roughly 1.6%, that is about $6,400 in annual tax reduced to about $5,760, a $640 savings. (Rates vary by school district, city, and county, so treat these as illustration, not a quote.) Here is when each dollar of that $640 shows up:
If that analysis lands in March, the homeowner who won in July waits eight months to see the win in her payment. That is normal, not a servicer error. The good news: the money is not lost, and there are two levers to speed it up.
Enter your Texas address and see whether your noticed value is above market before the May 15 protest window closes again.
Pin this next to your mortgage statement. The first six entries are fixed by the Texas Tax Code; the last one floats with your loan.
Three federal rules in 12 CFR 1024.17 govern where your protest savings go. The CFPB enforces all of them.
Regulation X permits a servicer to run an escrow analysis at other times during the computation year (Section 1024.17(f)(1)(ii)). Permits, not requires. So the play is a documented request, not a demand: once the county issues the corrected bill, call the escrow department, send the ARB order and the new bill, and ask them to re-run the analysis early. Many servicers will, because a correct projection is in their interest too. If yours declines, you are not stuck; the annual analysis will catch it, and the surplus rule guarantees the overage comes back to you then.
Timing note: there is no point requesting a re-analysis in July on the strength of the ARB order alone. Your servicer budgets off tax bills, not ARB orders, and the bill does not exist until the taxing units set rates and the county mails bills in the fall. Mark your calendar for October instead.
Escrow departments process paper, so give them everything in one packet:
Keep copies. If the next annual statement still projects taxes at the pre-protest amount, that packet is your evidence for a written notice of error to the servicer, and for a CFPB complaint if the servicer does not fix it.
A protest attacks this year's market value. Two other Texas mechanisms lower every future escrowed bill, and lenders can only price them in if they are actually on file.
In November 2025 Texas voters approved Proposition 13, raising the school district homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000 of appraised value under Tax Code Section 11.13(b). School taxes are typically the largest line on a Texas bill, so this exemption alone materially changes what your servicer needs to collect each month. Other taxing units may add a local-option exemption of up to 20% of value. The general application deadline is before May 1, and heir property owners can qualify with an affidavit of ownership, the prior owner's death certificate, and a recent utility bill.
Tax Code Section 23.23 caps annual increases in a homestead's appraised value at 10% plus the value of new improvements. But the cap does not start the day you close. It takes effect on January 1 of the tax year after the first year you qualify for the homestead exemption, and the prior owner's cap expires when they no longer qualify. Translation: in your first full tax year, the district can appraise your home at full market value with no cap protection at all.
This is exactly where escrow accounts on recently purchased Texas homes go wrong. A servicer that estimated the first-year escrow from the seller's old capped-and-exempted bill will under-collect, then hit you with a shortage spread over at least 12 months (Section 1024.17(f)(3)) once the real bill arrives. If you bought recently: file the homestead exemption promptly, protest the first uncapped appraisal if it overshoots your purchase price, and expect the first annual analysis to move.
Late protests happen; some ARB orders and lawsuit settlements land after January 31. The Comptroller's protest guidance is clear that when the ARB rules in your favor, the chief appraiser notifies the taxing units, and if the taxes were already paid, a refund is issued. That refund follows the payment, so it flows back toward the escrow account that paid the bill. From there the RESPA machinery above takes over: the money sits as a surplus until an analysis catches it, at which point the $50-or-more rule forces it out to you. Keep your own copy of the ARB order and match it against your next annual escrow statement.
One thing your servicer never controls: your right to protest. Filing with the ARB requires nothing from your lender, and winning obligates them to nothing except handling the smaller bill correctly. Every step of the Texas process, from evidence to hearing, is covered in our Texas property tax protest guide.
Get a Texas evidence packet with comparable sales and filing instructions, so the value your lender escrows against is one you already fought for.
No. Texas tax bills are not mailed until around October 1 (Tax Code Section 31.01), and payment is not delinquent until February 1 (Section 31.02). An August ARB order lands well before your lender pays the county from escrow, so the corrected value is the one that gets billed and paid this cycle. The only lag left is your servicer's escrow analysis.
No. Regulation X lets a servicer run an off-cycle analysis (12 CFR 1024.17(f)(1)(ii)) but only requires one per escrow computation year. Send the ARB order and the corrected tax bill and request one anyway; many servicers agree. If not, the annual analysis must account for the lower disbursement, and any surplus of $50 or more must be refunded within 30 days of that analysis if you are current.
Yes. The cushion is capped at one-sixth of estimated annual escrow disbursements (12 CFR 1024.17(c)(5)), so when your projected tax bill drops, the maximum cushion drops with it. That is why the refund after a protest-year analysis is often bigger than the tax savings alone: you get back the overage plus the excess cushion.
Usually both, mechanically. The seller's 10% appraisal cap under Tax Code Section 23.23 expired when they left, your own cap does not start until January 1 after your first qualifying year, and the seller's exemptions came off. If your servicer estimated escrow from the old bill, the first real bill creates a shortage that gets spread over your payments. File your homestead exemption, and protest the first uncapped value if it exceeds what you paid.
The exemption applies to your school district taxes once it is on file with your appraisal district, and your tax bill reflects it without any action by your lender. But your monthly payment only changes when your servicer next analyzes the account against the lower bill. Same lag, same fix: send the bill and request an early analysis, or wait for the annual one.