Should I hire someone to protest my property taxes?

Start with the baseline nobody advertises

The single most useful number in this decision comes from the Texas Comptroller: in Hays County, 94.66% of homeowners who protested informally in 2024 won a reduction. It was 99.63% in 2023, and 100% in 2021 and 2022. Those are homeowners of every stripe, most with no firm behind them. Filing is free, online in most major counties, and takes about 10 minutes.

So the honest framing is this: no company is selling you access to a secret process. The process is open, the win rates are already high, and what a paid service actually sells is two things, evidence quality and your time back.

What hiring costs, and when it's right

The full-service firms charge a percentage of your savings: Ownwell from 25% per year in Texas, Home Tax Shield $30 upfront plus 30% per year, Texas Protax and Five Stone around 40%, and O'Connor roughly 50% of your first-year savings. On a $1,500 annual saving, that's $375 to $750 of your money, and for the recurring services it repeats every winning year. The full fee breakdown has the math.

Hiring makes sense in two situations. You genuinely will not file the form, ever, in which case a firm that files is worth more than a packet you'll never use. Or your property is complex, commercial, multi-parcel, litigation-bound, where a firm like O'Connor brings capability you can't buy flat. We rank all of them honestly, including where they beat us, in the best Texas protest companies list.

The third option the percentage firms don't mention

Between free-and-DIY and 25-to-50-percent firms sits the flat-fee packet: pay once, get the evidence a firm would bring, file it yourself, keep everything. Our $99 packet pulls real comparable parcels from your county's own appraisal roll and writes the unequal-appraisal argument with your numbers. The free check shows your over-assessment and a real comp first, no signup, so you only buy when the public record shows an actual case.