AssessCheck

Your Notice of Appraised Value

When you receive one

The chief appraiser must send a written notice of appraised value by April 1 (or as soon as practicable) if the property is a single-family residence qualifying for the homestead exemption, and by May 1 (or as soon as practicable) for other property. A notice is required when:

The district's board of directors may dispense with a notice for an increase of $1,000 or less. Owners of real property that was reappraised, changed ownership, or requested one can receive a notice under a separate provision even when no increase occurred.

What the notice must contain

For real property, the notice must include, among other items: the taxing units in which the property is taxable; the preceding year's appraised and taxable values; the current year's appraised value and exemptions; whether the property qualifies for the circuit-breaker limitation; the market value of land and of improvements listed separately; the five-year percentage change in appraised value; a detailed explanation of how and when to protest; the date and place the ARB will begin hearing protests; an explanation of the informal conference option; and a notice of the estimated taxes and the no-new-revenue and voter-approval tax rates used to calculate them.

Worked example: reading your notice (illustrative)

Illustrative notice with made-up figures — compare the same lines on YOUR notice, which controls.

  1. Prior year: appraised $300,000 / taxable $160,000.
  2. This year: appraised $345,000, exemptions listed at $100,000 → taxable $245,000.
  3. Step — change in appraised: $345,000 vs $300,000 = +15%. If this is your homestead and the cap applied, only part of that jump could carry into taxable value — check both lines.
  4. Step — change in taxable: $245,000 vs $160,000 = +53% — larger than the appraised change, which usually means an exemption shrank or fell off (the notice lists kind and amount). That is often worth checking before arguing value at all.
  5. Step — the 5-year change line: a large five-year percentage is context, not by itself evidence of an error.

What this tells you: read appraised and taxable changes separately — they answer different questions ("is my value right?" vs "is my exemption right?").

What it does not tell you: whether the appraised value is defensible — that takes comparable evidence — or what your final bill will be, which depends on rates set later by your taxing units.

The deadline is tied to the notice

The protest deadline is generally May 15 or 30 days after the notice was delivered to you, whichever is later. Read our protest deadlines page before relying on any date.

If you did not receive a notice

State law is blunt on this point: failure to receive a required notice does not affect the validity of the appraisal, the tax, or the tax lien, and it does not change the exemption application deadline. There is a separate statutory remedy: a property owner may protest the failure to provide or deliver a required notice, which our late-protest discussion covers.

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