Do property tax protests work in Texas?

The win-rate data

Start with the cleanest numbers available, the Texas Comptroller's protest data. In Hays County, 94.66% of homeowners who protested informally in 2024 won a reduction. The year before it was 99.63%. In 2021 and 2022 it was 100%. Those aren't marketing claims, they're the state's own accounting of what happened to ordinary homeowners who showed up.

The money is real too. Comptroller-derived figures for Harris County in 2023 work out to roughly $875 in tax savings per winning single-family protest, about $220.32 million spread across roughly 251,613 winning protests. One protest, filed once, and the saving repeats every year you hold the lower assessed value.

Why the win rates are this high

Appraisal districts value millions of homes by formula, without seeing inside any of them. Mass appraisal is guessing at scale, and the guesses miss constantly. Our own study of 4.6 million parcel records across 13 Texas counties found about 945,000 over-assessed homes overpaying an estimated $1.4 billion a year. When you protest, you're not fighting a careful individual judgment, you're correcting a formula's error with specific evidence the formula never saw.

That's also why the process is friendlier than people expect. Most protests settle at the informal review; in Harris County only about 16% of 2024 protests went to a formal ARB determination. An appraiser sees a verifiable comp table, adjusts, done. What happens at the hearing, if you get that far, is a 15 to 30 minute conversation, not a trial.

The variable you control is evidence

High win rates don't mean every protest wins big. The difference between a token $25 trim and a four-figure cut is the comp table. Our $99 packet builds yours from your county's actual appraisal roll, real parcels you can verify, with the unequal-appraisal argument under Section 41.43(b)(3) written out. Run the free check first: 30 seconds, no signup, and you'll see whether the public record says you're one of the 945,000.