The El Paso Central Appraisal District has certified this year’s property valuations, and the final figures show modest increases in both taxable values and the number of property owners challenging their assessments.

The CAD’s annual valuations are based largely on a property’s market value and determine the property taxes that will be owed by the owners of the estimated 450,000 parcels of taxable land in the region. Because Texas has no state income tax, the multitude of local taxing entities – from school and utility districts to the county’s small towns and cities – rely heavily on property taxes to fund public services.

El Paso County’s total property valuations increased 2.13% from last year, according to valuations certified July 24. By comparison, valuations rose 5.5% in 2025.

“It looks like we had about half of the rate of increase as we did last year” in the county, said David Stone, deputy chief appraiser. “Almost half of the increase is coming from outside the city limits.”

Within the city of El Paso, property valuations rose 1.08% from 2025, down from the 4.13% increase recorded between 2023 and 2024.

Property valuation notices were sent in April, and property owners are given a window to challenge their assessments with CAD appraisers and, when necessary, hearings with the independent Appraisal Review Board. The goal is to resolve as many protests as possible, either by reducing valuations or denying the appeal, before the CAD certifies its tax roll.

With home prices increasing over the years, property taxes have followed that trend, leading to a spike in valuation protests. Before the COVID-19 pandemic led to surges in home costs, the CAD typically received about 20,000 protests each year. Since then, the agency has seen an average of 46,000 annually.

The number continued to increase this year. Property owners filed 51,319 protests in 2026, up from 47,281 in 2025.

A little less than half of this year’s protests led to a reduction in property valuations, according to CAD data. Those successful protests lowered the total valuations by about 8%, Stone said.

In 2025, about 45% of protested valuations were lowered, leading to a 7.5% drop in protested valuations.

“We saw a decent increase in the amount of protests we got this year, even though the property values didn’t go up that much over last year,” Stone said.

As of Friday, more than 11,000 protests remained unresolved, representing about $3.2 billion in taxable value, Stone said.

The settlement process will continue to the middle of August, then “anything that’s still not settled by then will get heard at some later date whenever the (Appraisal Review Board) goes back into session,” he said.

Stone said the increase in protests likely stems from the tax advisor industry stepping up its marketing and encouraging more property owners to challenge their valuations.

“There was a lot of consumer-level advertising, a big push, back in the spring, to try to get people to sign up with property tax agents to protest their value and get their property value lowered,” Stone said.

He said this is a relatively new trend. In previous years, tax agents tended to focus on commercial property valuation protests.

“But now we’re seeing a concerted effort by certain companies to get a lot of residential, individual taxpayers, to sign up,” Stone said.

Julian Paredes, a property tax consultant based in El Paso, agreed.

“We definitely saw a huge jump between last year to now,” he said, attributing the increase to the rising costs of property taxes over the past five years.

“Property values across the board have just spiked,” he said. “Especially when looking at residential, which has increased drastically because of the market and interest rates and whatnot,” Paredes said.

The slower pace of valuation growth this year may reflect a softer housing market, Stone said.

“The market is not as active as it was last year,” he said, which undercut the demand for buying property and diminished those values.

The 2026 net taxable value of property in El Paso County totals about $76 billion, which will be divided among the region’s taxing entities, each of which sets its own tax rate.

The slower growth in property values means local governments could see smaller increases in tax revenue than they have in recent years, if they don’t raise rates.

“One of the bigger takeaways is that the taxing units are not going to get as big an increase as they have the last couple of years,” said Stone, which means local taxing entities might “raise their tax rates to generate the amount of revenue that they’re going to need to operate.”

“But that’s totally up to the taxing units,” he added.

Local governments are working on their budgets, a process that usually extends into late September. After budgets are finalized, taxing entities will know how much revenue they’ll need from property taxes.

“Then they’ll decide what property tax rates they want to set,” Stone said.

Home

About

El Paso property valuations up modestly, protests climb