Texas VATRE 2026: What’s on Your November 3 Ballot

The deadline passed on Monday, August 17, 2026. Under the Texas Election Code, that was the last day a school district, city or county could order an election for the November 3 uniform election date — which means the ballot Texans will actually vote on is now fixed, and it can be read from filed election orders instead of guessed at from press speculation.

What’s on it, in district after district, is a request to raise the school maintenance-and-operations tax rate. And the most important thing a homeowner can know before November is this: in the districts with the lowest home values, most homestead owners will not pay the increase at all. That is not spin from either side. It is arithmetic produced by the state’s own $140,000 homestead exemption, and in El Paso’s Ysleta ISD the appraisal district’s data shows it applies to roughly two-thirds of owner-occupied homes.

Here is what the districts are asking, what the law actually requires them to disclose, and how to read the numbers in the mailers.

Why August 17 closed the field

A Texas political subdivision may not order an election later than the 78th day before election day (Texas Election Code § 3.005). For the November 3, 2026 ballot, that was Monday, August 17. We covered the full deadline sequence — including the efficiency-audit and rate-adoption gates — in the August deadline chain that decides whether you get to vote.

The practical effect is that the speculation season is over. Every district discussed below has taken a recorded board vote.

What a VATRE actually is — and why “below no-new-revenue” doesn’t exempt a district

A voter-approval tax rate election, or VATRE, is triggered by Texas Tax Code § 26.08. Subsection (a) is blunt: if a school board adopts a rate above the district’s voter-approval tax rate, the district’s registered voters “must determine whether to approve the adopted tax rate.”

The critical detail — and the one that confuses the most homeowners — is how that voter-approval rate is calculated. Under § 26.08(n), a school district’s voter-approval rate is a formula: the district’s maximum compressed rate for the year, plus the greater of the prior year’s enrichment rate or $0.05 per $100, plus the district’s current debt rate.

It is not tied to the no-new-revenue rate. That is why a district can propose a rate that is below what it charged last year, and below its own no-new-revenue rate, and still be legally required to hold an election. Ysleta ISD is exactly that case, as shown below.

The law does force real disclosure. Under § 26.08(b), the ballot proposition itself must state the adopted rate, the percentage increase in maintenance-and-operations tax revenue compared with the prior year, and the dollar amount of that increase. When you get to the voting booth, those figures will be printed in front of you.

Six districts, six different asks

The 2025 adopted total rates below come from our audited dataset of Texas Comptroller adopted rates. The 2026 proposals come from each district’s own announcement and local coverage, and are noted as such.

Two things stand out. First, these are not small districts on the fringe — Cy-Fair is one of the largest districts in Texas. Second, every one of these districts is asking in the same year the state’s expanded homestead exemption was supposed to be delivering relief. That is not a contradiction so much as a consequence, and the Ysleta numbers show why.

The finding: most Ysleta homestead owners won’t pay it either way

Ysleta ISD trustees voted unanimously to send a $1.19 per $100 rate to voters — higher than the $1.15 voter-approval rate the board could have adopted on its own, which is what triggered the election. Note that $1.19 is lower than the district’s 2025 adopted rate of $1.2005, and lower than its no-new-revenue rate of $1.25. The district is not reaching for a windfall; it is shifting 3 cents from its debt-service rate to its operating rate — a “penny swap” — to generate up to $5.5 million a year against a deficit that nearly wiped out its savings.

Then comes the part worth pausing on. According to an El Paso Matters analysis of El Paso Central Appraisal District data, more than 26,000 Ysleta ISD homeowners — two-thirds of all owner-occupied homes in the district — will pay no school property tax whether the measure passes or fails, because the value of their exemptions exceeds the taxable value of their homes, or because they are 100% disabled veterans, who are exempt from Texas property taxes entirely.

Why that happens

Three exemptions stack on a Ysleta homestead:

• $140,000 — the school district residence homestead exemption required by Texas Tax Code § 11.13(b), raised from $100,000 by Proposition 13 in 2025. We covered that change in detail in our post on the $140,000 homestead exemption.
• $60,000 more for homeowners 65 or older or disabled, under § 11.13(c) — a $200,000 combined exemption.
• A 20% local option exemption that Ysleta ISD itself grants, authorized by § 11.13(n).

By its terms, the § 11.13(b) exemption is from “taxation by a school district” — it is not written as a maintenance-and-operations-only exemption, and it therefore also shelters value from the district’s debt-service tax. (The narrow exception is § 11.13(i), which lets a taxing unit disregard the exemption for taxes already pledged to debt where honoring it would impair the bond contract.) That is why an appraisal district can say those homeowners pay no school tax, full stop — not merely no operating tax.

So who does pay?

The increase lands on everything the homestead exemption doesn’t cover: homes appraised above the exemption stack, rental and other non-homestead residential property, and commercial property. In Ysleta’s case that includes Meta’s $10 billion data center under development in northeast El Paso, expected to become one of the county’s largest taxpayers.

This is the honest shape of the story. The state’s expanded homestead exemption did what it was designed to do for lower-value homesteads — and, as a second-order effect, it made a school operating-tax increase far less costly to the median homestead voter in a district like Ysleta, while concentrating the cost on business property and higher-value homes. Whether that is good policy is a fair argument. That it is the actual mechanism is not.

Four ways the ask gets framed — and how to read each one

Every district below is disclosing real numbers. But the framing choices differ, and each one answers a slightly different question than the one homeowners are asking.

1. “Your total rate is still lower than last year”

McKinney ISD says its total tax rate “will still be 3.79 cents lower than last year and all 5 propositions can be funded within this tax rate.” That is a true statement about the total rate, which falls largely because the state compresses the M&O rate. It is not a statement that the district isn’t asking for more money — Proposition A would generate roughly $4.1 million a year after recapture. Both things are true at once.

McKinney also notes the point homeowners most often miss: individual tax bills can rise even when a district lowers its rate, because your bill is rate × your taxable value, and appraised values move independently.

2. Net-of-offset arithmetic

Cy-Fair ISD’s board called a 12-cent VATRE, but the district’s message is a 9-cent increase — the difference being a projected 3-cent reduction in the debt-service rate that the bond is expected to allow. Read the word “projected.” The 12 cents is what voters are being asked to authorize on the operating side; the 3-cent offset is a forecast about the debt side, not a guarantee printed on the ballot.

The underlying pressure is real and specific: district officials cited $94 million in budget cuts from FY 2024-25 into FY 2026-27 against a projected $80.9 million shortfall, and noted that state funding formulas do not compensate the district for the revenue it forgoes by granting a 20% local optional homestead exemption — which it cannot reduce until January 1, 2028.

3. Year-one dollar figures

San Antonio ISD deserves credit for disclosing the whole curve rather than just the first number. The district estimates the impact on its average homeowner at $1.99 a month in 2026, rising to $3.25 a month in 2027 and $5.76 a month by 2030. When a district quotes you a monthly figure, check whether it is the year-one figure or the steady-state one. SAISD also notes that homeowners with both a homestead and an Over-65 exemption on file, who owned the home as of January 1, 2026, are not affected by any of the propositions.

Socorro ISD, by contrast, quotes a single figure: about $10 per month on an average $250,000 home, for roughly $49.2 million a year.

4. Penny swaps

Ysleta’s proposal moves 3 cents from debt service to operations. The total rate barely moves — but debt capacity is what is being repurposed, which is a real trade-off deferred to a later bond conversation rather than eliminated. A flat total rate is not the same as a costless decision.

What we could not verify

In the interest of being straight with readers:

• Every 2026 figure above comes from district announcements and local news coverage. We did not obtain the filed election orders themselves, which are the primary documents and will control the exact ballot language.
• Sources conflict on the date of the Ysleta ISD vote. El Paso Matters published the story on August 12, 2026 and describes a Wednesday vote, which is consistent with Wednesday, August 12; one syndicated version says August 15, which was a Saturday. We use August 12.
• We could not confirm whether Northside ISD (Bexar) or South San ISD called elections, or whether El Paso ISD called its reported bond. Earlier reporting described a South San penny swap of about 7 cents, but we did not verify an ordered election. Treat these as open.
• No authoritative statewide tally of ordered November 2026 school tax and bond elections was available at the time of writing. This post is not a complete list of what is on the ballot in Texas — check your own county’s elections office.

What to do next

• Read the ballot proposition itself. Under Tax Code § 26.08(b), a VATRE proposition must state the adopted rate and the percentage and dollar increase in M&O revenue. That is the number the district is actually asking for.
• Look for your district’s efficiency audit. Under Texas Education Code § 11.184, a district holding a rate-ratification election must post an outside audit of its own spending at least 30 days before the election — by roughly October 4, 2026 for a November 3 election — and hold an open meeting on the results. Almost nobody reads these. They are on the district’s website.
• Check your own exemptions first. If your homestead’s taxable value is already below your exemption stack, a school M&O increase may not change your bill at all. If it isn’t, it will. Your appraisal district can tell you which side of that line you’re on.
• Mark the dates. Early voting runs October 19–30, 2026; Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
• Look up your county’s current rates on our county pages — Harris, Bexar, El Paso, Collin and Brazos — and verify anything that will cost you money against your county appraisal district.

For background on how these elections came to dominate the school-funding conversation, see our earlier reporting on the 2025 VATRE surge, recapture and Texas school finance, and the summer 2026 rate votes.

Sources

• Texas Tax Code § 26.08 — school district voter-approval tax rate, ballot language, and the § 26.08(n) rate formula
• Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts — Property Tax Exemptions ($140,000 school homestead exemption under § 11.13(b); $60,000 additional under § 11.13(c); local option up to 20% under § 11.13(n))
• Texas Election Code § 3.005 — deadline to order an election
• Texas Education Code § 11.184 — efficiency audit requirement
• Texas Comptroller 2025 adopted tax rates, as compiled in this site’s county rate dataset
• McKinney ISD — Board Calls Bond and VATRE Election (district announcement, Aug. 11, 2026)
• ABC13 Houston — Cy-Fair ISD to hold November bond, voter-approval tax rate election
• FOX San Antonio — SAISD voters to decide Nov. 3 on 3.17-cent tax hike and $600M bond package
• El Paso Matters / KVIA — Voters to decide on Ysleta ISD tax rate that would have little to no impact on most homeowners
• KVIA — SISD board places tax rate election on November ballot
• Community Impact — Bryan ISD calls November election for proposed tax rate increase