Guides

Who Sets Your Texas Property Value: CAD or State?

Your local appraisal district sets your value; the Texas Comptroller only audits the CAD and school funding. Here's how the PVS and MAP really work.

When your property value jumps and your tax bill climbs with it, a natural question follows: who decided my home is worth that much — the county, or the State of Texas? The answer matters, because it tells you who you can actually push back against. The short version: your local appraisal district sets your value, and the state never touches your individual number. But the state does audit the appraisal district’s work, and that audit creates real pressure on how your county appraises. Here is how the two roles fit together.

Your value is set locally — by the CAD, not the state

Every Texas county has a Central Appraisal District (CAD), a local entity governed by a board of directors. The CAD analyzes sales, market trends, and property characteristics, and assigns an appraised value to each property in the county. That value — subject to your right to protest it before the Appraisal Review Board — is what your tax bill is built on.

The Texas Comptroller does not set, review, or dictate the value on any individual home. There is no state list saying “this house must be worth $450,000.” If your appraised value is wrong, the entity to fight is your CAD, through a timely protest — not the state.

What the Comptroller actually does: the Property Value Study

Here is where the confusion starts. The Texas Comptroller’s Property Tax Assistance Division runs an annual School District Property Value Study (PVS). It is required by law to estimate the total taxable value of property in each school district at least once every two years. Crucially, the PVS is a check on the CAD’s work as a whole — not on your house.

The process works like this:

  1. The CAD appraises properties. It assigns values across categories — residential, commercial, agricultural, vacant land.
  2. The Comptroller audits the totals. The state studies actual sales and market data in each school district and compares its own estimate of market value to the values the CAD assigned.
  3. The Comptroller calculates a ratio. If the state estimates a set of sampled homes is worth $100 million and the CAD valued them at $92 million, the ratio is 92%.
  4. A tolerance range applies. To “pass,” a CAD generally must fall within a 5% margin of error of the Comptroller’s value — and that margin applies to the overall weighted ratio across all sampled property, not to any single home or neighborhood.

The consequence is about school funding — not your bill

This is the part most homeowners get wrong. When a CAD’s values fall outside the margin, the Comptroller does not go back and change anyone’s appraisal. Instead, the state may substitute its own taxable value for the purpose of calculating state school funding.

Texas school finance is built so that the state and local property taxpayers share the cost. If a district’s CAD appraises too low and the state used those low numbers, the district would effectively pull down extra state aid it isn’t entitled to. So when a CAD’s values are found invalid, the state uses its own (higher) value in the funding formula — and the local school district, not the homeowner, absorbs the consequence in reduced state dollars.

That is the real reason you hear that a CAD is “under pressure from the Comptroller.” The pressure is to pass the PVS and protect the district’s share of state funding — which creates a practical incentive for the CAD to keep its appraisals close to market sales data. But the direction of that pressure is toward not appraising too low, for school-finance reasons, not toward any individual’s number.

The other audit: the Methods and Assistance Program (MAP)

Alongside the PVS, the Comptroller runs the Methods and Assistance Program (MAP). Where the PVS checks whether the numbers are accurate, MAP is an operational audit of the appraisal district itself — its governance, appraisal methods, taxpayer assistance, and documented procedures.

By law (Texas Tax Code § 5.102) the Comptroller must review each CAD at least once every two years. In practice, MAP reviews roughly half of the state’s appraisal districts each year on a rolling basis; the school districts in counties not reviewed in a given year get a PVS instead. Most districts receive recommendations and then implement corrective actions before any escalation. Denton County, for example, underwent a MAP review in 2024.

The bottom line for homeowners

Put plainly:

That means your real leverage is local. If your value looks too high, the lever that actually changes your bill is a protest with your appraisal district before the deadline — not an appeal to Austin. Start with your own county’s page to see the adopted rates and where to file: Denton, Collin, Tarrant, Dallas, and Harris are common starting points, and all 254 counties are covered on this site.

Sources

How to Protest Your Taxes → Find Your County

Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy