Denton County, Texas property tax

ACS 5-year median real estate taxes paid (table B25103) divided by ACS 5-year median value of owner-occupied housing units (table B25077), county-wide. This is a ratio of two independently estimated medians — not the median of the ratio, and not a rate any parcel is billed. It reflects the actual mix of overlapping districts, exemptions and assessment caps as experienced by owner-occupants, and it lags: a 5-year sample centres about two and a half years before its end date.

Layer 1 of the county property-tax corpus: a MEASURED baseline from ACS 2020-2024 5-year, not a published rate. No statutory rate, assessment ratio or exemption has been collected for these counties yet, so nothing here should be read as what a particular property would be billed.

Three corrections worth carrying forward, because each is widely misreported. (1) The business personal property de minimis exemption is $2,500 for tax year 2025 and operates as a threshold; the $125,000 subtraction begins in tax year 2026. (2) School districts have NO 2.5% voter-approval rate — §26.08(n) sets theirs from the maximum compressed rate plus the greater of last year's enrichment rate or five cents, plus debt. The 2.5% figure is a separate instrument, a compression trigger in Education Code §48.2551 that holds tier-one revenue growth rather than capping a rate. For TY2025 the state maximum compressed rate is $0.6322 per $100, the §48.2552 local floor is $0.5689, and §45.003(d) caps any district's total maintenance-and-operations rate at $0.8022. (3) Commercial property is NOT excluded from every cap: §23.231 gives non-homestead real property a 20% appraisal cap through tax year 2026. Two traps in the §5.091 spreadsheets, which are otherwise the best statewide file in the country. A rate of ZERO is ambiguous between "levies no tax" and "did not report" — 347 of 4,862 units show zero, and the ONLY discriminator is a trailing asterisk in the taxing-unit name, which must be parsed. And the files carry no FIPS or GEOID at all; COUNTY ID is the Comptroller's own alphabetical 001-254 code, so Dallas is 057 rather than 113, and a name-to-GEOID crosswalk is required. The schema also breaks between 2023 and 2024, and the files are revised in place — every 2025 row currently reads version "Working" dated 28 January 2026, with an August refresh due at the same URLs, so any ingest must record its own fetch date.