You must have an incredibly fancy house. My property taxes aren't even $20k (far from it, more like $12k) for a 2400sqft 4 bedroom house with a pool with pretty good DART access just down the street from a nice city park.
Just paying $20k would place the assessed home value after exemptions at >$970k. Standard homestead exemption is $40k, so $1.1M for actual assessed value. But you're saying $20k above whatever you're paying already, I'm guessing you're probably paying close to $20k since you're looking at >$1M homes, so in reality you're looking at like >$1.5M homes. That's an incredibly fancy house, far more than normal. That's more than twice the average price of a house in Plano, a pretty nice place to live if you're gonna live in Texas.
+1 If OP has a big yard, a well-maintained house, and decent schools nearby, that almost immediately puts you over $1m in Austin. If their house actually has some serious square footage or acreage, $1.5-2m isn't ridiculous.
You can take hits on one or more of those requirements to get the price down but it's not apples-to-apples anymore.
What's the price for a big yard, well-maintained, 2,000+sqft, with decent schools house cost in San Franciso or LA? And not in a suburb far away, but in the city? What are the property taxes on such a place?
Yeah but it seems you're then trying to paint that as a brush for all of Texas. Austin real estate values are stupid. You shouldn't spend that much to live in a house that small in Texas. It's like looking at a large house in actual downtown San Francisco and acting like that's the housing price for all of California.
I'm just trying to point out the majority of the state doesn't pay well over $20k in property taxes. Only very wealthy people do.
In 2021 the average single family home in Texas was like $260k. Values have gone way up, let's say $320k for example. Minus $40k for homestead, $280k assessed. Living in a city you're going to see like 2% property tax, so $5,600. So your $30-40k tax bill is probably six times the average tax of a house in Texas.
Six times the average tax bill.
See how that's just not a normal price most people actually pay?
Just paying $20k would place the assessed home value after exemptions at >$970k. Standard homestead exemption is $40k, so $1.1M for actual assessed value. But you're saying $20k above whatever you're paying already, I'm guessing you're probably paying close to $20k since you're looking at >$1M homes, so in reality you're looking at like >$1.5M homes. That's an incredibly fancy house, far more than normal. That's more than twice the average price of a house in Plano, a pretty nice place to live if you're gonna live in Texas.