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Texas HB 8 Died. Your $0.0331 School-Tax Cut Is Real.

Texas tax sites credit a $0.0331 school-tax cut to HB 8 – a bill that never passed. Here is the law that actually delivered it, and what 2026 holds.

If you have read a “2026 Texas property tax changes” roundup this year, you have probably seen this claim: House Bill 8 gave school districts a temporary one-year tax-rate cut of $0.0331 per $100 of value, and it expires September 1, 2027.

Half of that is true. The $0.0331 cut is real, it is on your 2025 school-tax bill, and it is worth about $33 for every $100,000 of taxable value. But HB 8 never became law. It died in a House committee in April 2025 without ever getting a floor vote. The cut came from somewhere else entirely — and that difference changes what you should expect in 2026.

What HB 8 would have done

House Bill 8 of the 89th Legislature’s regular session, authored by Rep. Meyer, was captioned “relating to a reduction in the maximum compressed tax rate of a school district.” Its text would have added a new Section 48.2554 to the Education Code reading, in part:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of this title or Chapter 26, Tax Code, for the 2025-2026 school year, the commissioner shall calculate the value of a school district’s maximum compressed tax rate by determining the district’s maximum compressed rate under Section 48.2551 or 48.2552(b), if applicable, and reducing the tax rate determined under the applicable section by $0.0331.”

The bill’s final subsection read: “This section expires September 1, 2027.” That is the source of the “expires in 2027” line now circulating on tax-consultant sites. It is a quote from a bill, not from Texas law.

The bill never passed

The Legislature’s own action history for HB 8 is short and unambiguous:

That is the last entry. The Calendars Committee is the gatekeeper that decides which bills reach the House floor, and HB 8 never got past it. There was no House vote, no Senate vote, no governor’s signature. Section 48.2554 does not exist in the Education Code.

(A different HB 8 did pass in the 89th Legislature’s second called session and was signed on Sept. 17, 2025 — but that bill is about public school accountability and STAAR testing. It has nothing to do with tax rates. Bill numbers reset every session, and that is an easy trap.)

So where did the $0.0331 actually come from?

From a law that has been on the books since 2019.

The Texas Education Agency’s June 12, 2025 letter setting tax year 2025 maximum compressed rates shows the state compression math in a single line:

0.6855 × (1.025 ÷ 1.056) – 0.0331 = $0.6322

Read that left to right. $0.6855 was the state maximum compression rate for tax year 2024, per TEA’s Aug. 5, 2024 letter. The (1.025 ÷ 1.056) is the routine annual compression under Education Code § 48.2551 — when statewide property values grow faster than 2.5 percent, the school M&O rate is squeezed down so districts do not simply pocket the growth. And the − 0.0331 is an extra reduction that TEA attributes not to HB 8, but to Education Code § 48.2552(c), applied “after accounting for additional state revenue as determined under TEC, §48.2552(b).”

Section 48.2552 was added by House Bill 3 in 2019 and last amended in 2021. Subsection (b) is the “90 percent floor” that keeps any district’s compressed rate from falling too far below the highest district’s. Subsection (c) then requires that the state money saved by that floor “shall be used to lower the state compression percentage under Section 48.255.”

In plain English: a recurring, formula-driven mechanism in existing law swept up some savings and pushed everyone’s school rate down a little further. It is not a one-off gift from a 2025 bill.

This has happened before

It is not even the first time. TEA’s Feb. 3, 2022 letter told districts that “the maximum state compression rate for TY 2022 will continue to be reduced by an additional 0.003 pennies” under the same subsection. Same machinery, much smaller number.

What the cut is worth on your bill

The $0.0331 applies to your school district’s maintenance-and-operations rate, per $100 of taxable value. The arithmetic:

That is straight multiplication, not an estimate of your actual bill. Your real number depends on your district’s adopted rate, your exemptions, and your appraised value. The 2025 confirmed rates for your county are on your county page — for example Harris County, Dallas County, Bexar County, Travis County, or Tarrant County.

TEA’s final tax year 2025 letter, dated Aug. 28, 2025, confirmed the $0.6322 state maximum, with a local compression floor of $0.5689 — so districts landed somewhere in the range of $0.5689 to $0.6322.

Why the distinction matters for 2026

This is not pedantry about bill numbers. The two stories predict different futures.

If the cut came from HB 8, it would carry a hard statutory sunset — that bill’s own text expired the section on Sept. 1, 2027 — and you would expect your school rate to snap back up. That is exactly the framing being repeated.

Because the reduction was instead folded into the state compression percentage under § 48.2552(c), there is no such expiration date to point at. Compression under § 48.2551 carries a district’s prior-year rate forward as the starting point for the next year’s calculation, so a reduction that lands in the compressed rate does not automatically reverse itself.

What is genuinely uncertain is whether you get another extra reduction for tax year 2026. That depends on a calculation TEA runs each year, and on how much state revenue the 90-percent floor frees up. It is worth watching: the 2022 version of this reduction was $0.003; the 2025 version was more than ten times that.

As of Aug. 4, 2026, TEA had not yet published a tax year 2026 preliminary MCR letter that we could locate. Last year’s landed on Aug. 5. If you want the real number for your district’s 2026 school rate rather than a projection, that letter — and your district’s own adopted rate — is where it will appear.

How to check a claim like this yourself

Anyone can run the check that unwound this one, in about five minutes:

  1. Look up the bill. Go to capitol.texas.gov, search the bill number, and open the Actions tab. If the last action is anything other than “Signed by the Governor” or “Effective on…”, it is not law.
  2. Check the session. Bill numbers repeat across regular and special sessions. “HB 8” meant two completely different bills in 2025.
  3. Find the operative agency document. For school rates that is TEA’s annual maximum compressed tax rate letter, which shows the actual math and cites the actual statute.
  4. Read the statute it cites — not the bill that proposed to change it.

What to do next

Sources

How to Protest Your Taxes → Find Your County

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