Texas keeps sale prices secret, and it doesn’t matter, because you can argue unequal appraisal from public assessed values.
The law and the data both work here. Texas is a non-disclosure state, so comparable sale prices aren’t public. But Tax Code 41.43(b)(3) lets you win by showing your appraised value exceeds the median appraised value of a reasonable number of comparable properties, and those appraised values are public. Texas is also the single biggest appeal market in the country at roughly 3 million protests a year.
So Texas gives you a ground that runs on published assessed values rather than on sale prices. You're not showing what your house would sell for. You're showing that homes genuinely like yours are assessed lower than yours is, using numbers the county already publishes.
Now that matters more than it sounds, because it means a state keeping sale prices private doesn't stop you. Illinois, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Kansas, Massachusetts and DC all have some version of it, and honestly it's usually the stronger argument even where sale prices are public.
May 15 or 30 days after your notice, whichever is later.
Miss it and you generally wait a year, so honestly the date matters more than the paperwork does.
And wherever you are, the single most useful thing you can do today is go find your assessment notice and read the date printed on it. That's what starts your clock, it's usually a much shorter window than people expect, and there's no getting it back once it's gone.
Worth knowing before you pay anyone: every large Texas firm we checked, Ownwell, O'Connor, Home Tax Shield and Texas Tax Protest, charges nothing up front and takes a share of your savings instead. That’s an easier yes than paying in advance, and you should compare.
So we only turn a state on after reading its appeal rules and its actual board decisions, so that what we tell somebody is right rather than generic. That takes a few days per state and it's honestly the reason our answers are worth anything.
In the meantime our free check runs in Washington, Illinois and Oregon. If you leave your email on the check page we'll write to you the day Texas goes live, and not before.
Also, there's one move that has nothing to do with appealing and that a lot of people miss entirely. Most states take exemptions off your bill before any of the value arithmetic happens, starting with a homestead exemption if you actually live in the house, and usually extra ones for owners over 65, for veterans, and for people with disabilities. They're often worth more than an appeal win, they carry forward year after year rather than needing to be re-won, and plenty of people who qualify have never filed for them. Your county assessor's website lists what's available where you live, and it costs nothing to look.
We screened all fifty states and DC on the same two questions. Does winning a lower market value actually lower your bill, or is there a cap sitting in between? And can the evidence even be assembled from public records?
This comes from our own fifty-state screen, which checked each state's cap structure, whether sale prices are public, whether an assessment-based argument exists, and how many appeals actually get filed. Where we quote an appeal count it came from the state or county that published it. If you spot an error, please write to hello@propertytaxbuddy.com and we'll correct it and say what changed.