Bexar Appraisal District determines the market value of a home as the first step to determining its taxable value.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
The envelope from the Bexar Appraisal District has landed in your mailbox. You open it — and there’s a mass of type in small print. It’s your appraisal notice.
Just looking at it may spark an urge to fold it back up, put it back in the envelope and say you’ll look at it later.
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But let’s tackle it together.
The top left section is the district’s contact information and your address, including the property ID number. That number is your account number with the Bexar County tax assessor-collector. In the top right section is your account number with the appraisal district; information about the property, such as your ownership stake and its legal and mailing addresses; and the ID number and PIN that you’ll need to use the district’s online portal. There are also reminders that this notice is not a bill.
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In the middle, there are two sections with a bunch of numbers. A quick scan of the first section shows there’s five rows of various types of market value, productivity value, appraised value, cap value and exemptions. The second section offers up exemption amounts, taxable values, appraised value and taxing units. This is the meat of the appraisal notice — we’ll get to it in more detail below.
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Below that is the fine print — with details such as who sets the amount of taxes, the property tax database, exemptions and information on filing a protest, including the deadline and where to send it. The back is the form that has to be filled out if you’re protesting your appraisal. Read these sections at your leisure — but if you’re planning to protest, do not skip reading them.
Now let’s get back to the middle of the first page and all those numbers.
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Shown is an example of what the Bexar County appraisal notice looks like. It’s from a Bexar County Appraisal video.
Screen grab
Getting your market value
The first section looks at what’s called your appraisal information for last year and what’s proposed for the current year. The first five rows deal with the property’s market value as determined by the appraisal district.
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Most homeowners will be dealing with the first two rows — market value of improvements and of non-agricultural/timber land. The first is the value of the home and any other buildings on the land while the second essentially refers to your yard. The next two rows will have values of 0 for most (and in the sixth row) unless you’re a farmer or have mineral rights, so we’ll skip over those.
The fifth row is the total market value — this is what the district estimates your property would have sold for on the open market on Jan. 1. It adds up the values in the previous rows. But this is not what your taxes will be based on. That number is in the seventh row — appraised value, which is sometimes called the assessed value.
Determining your appraised value
To get your appraised value, the appraisal district first will deduct any exemptions you have from the total market value. The exemptions you have are listed in the last row. For example, if the property is your primary residence, you should be receiving a homestead, or HS, exemption.
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READ MORE: These Texas property tax breaks can cut homeowners’ bills. See if you qualify for an exemption.
Your appraised value also is affected by the homestead cap, or circuit breaker limitation, which is referenced in the row below the appraised value. This is getting a bit in the weeds, but here goes. If the property has a homestead exemption, Texas law limits — or caps — how much its taxable value can increase in a year to 10%. That means even if the market value of your home jumped 20%, the taxable value can increase only 10%. So the cap also plays a role in determining your appraised value. The cap doesn’t kick in until the Jan. 1 after you qualify for the exemption — so if you applied for a homestead exemption in March, the cap doesn’t take effect until Jan. 1, 2027.
OK, that’s it for the first section — now let’s go on to the next set of numbers. (Do you feel like you’re back in school yet? This is what teachers would have called a real-world example.)
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Finding your taxable value
The second section has six columns — the previous year’s exemption amount and taxable value, the taxing unit, and this year’s proposed appraised value, exemption amount and taxable value.
Essentially, this section breaks down where your taxes are going — the city, the county, the school district you live in and other entities, such as University Health and the San Antonio River Authority. You’ll see that the proposed appraised value has been dropped into the fourth column of each row. But the exemption amounts differ by taxing unit, leading to a different taxable value for each entity. By comparing the amounts for this year with the previous year, you can see how much the taxable value of your property is changing.
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If you’re successful in appealing your appraisal, those taxable values will come down. The final taxable values are what will be used to determine your tax bill, which will be mailed out this fall.