Hidalgo County Property Taxes
How to deal with the necessary evil of property taxes in Hidalgo County Texas: A how to research property taxes guide.


In today’s day and age information is the key resource in any business transaction. Make no mistake about it, buying a home, Condo or other real estate is in fact the most important business deal many people will ever face. There is good news however: never before in history has the average citizen had the power of the internet search engines to enable them to acquire piles of information on the wanted property, its developer, location and value. This article will deal with property taxes.

As many of you already know Texas has no income taxes and the state’s primary source of income is sales and property taxes, I will attempt in layman’s terms to show you how to find out the exact total tax rate for a specific property you are interested in.

Generally Texas tax rates are expressed in dollar amounts per thousand dollars of appraised value. For example if I told you your total tax rate for your property is $1.50 that would be a dollar fifty for each thousand dollars of appraised value. If your property appraised for $100,000 your property taxes would be ($1.50) X ($100,000) =$1500 per year then divide by 12 months in a year would equal $125.00 a month. 

Heck that’s simple you might say and it is. However, in Texas there are many taxing units that make it difficult to determine the exact dollar amount of the tax rate on a specific piece of property. These units consist of cities, counties, special taxing units (fire, ambulance, police, and community colleges) and school districts. So the location of a piece of property within these districts determines the tax rate for that particular piece of property. 

Ok with that behind us let's by example look up a specific piece of property in Hidalgo County, Texas. You may not realize it but the amount paid by citizens as property tax is a matter of public record and available on the internet. Yes you can look up Uncle Bills house or that loudmouth down at the factory’s house and see what it appraises for and how much the taxes are and whether uncle bill has paid his taxes. Nosey bunches aren’t we? Let’s get started. 

	If you click on the Hidalgo County Tax office link you will see a page like the one on the left. Now looking at the page above it is obvious we need either the property's address or the owner's name both of which you can get from the realtor or if the realtor doesn’t want to give you the owners name at least you can get the address.   So whose house /property are we going to look up?   Might as well be some politician I suppose so let me suggest the Mayor of McAllen, Texas, the Hon. Richard Cortez.  Click on the tax link for Hidalgo County Tax office and where it says search by select owner name type in Cortez Richard and hit the search button and you should see the following:
	Now click on the account number and you should see this: Gross Value: $200,557 Land Value: $48,876 Improvement Value: $151,681 Capped Value: $0 Agricultural Value: $0 Exemptions: HOM Exemption and Tax Rate Information Taxes Due Detail by Year and Jurisdiction Payment Information
	Now, we are almost at the end of our quest for the specific tax information. One final click away. Next, click on Exemptions and Tax Rate Information. The result should be a page as the one to the left. Since what we are looking for is the total tax rate for this specific location we must add the different districts together (.0492) + (.59) + (1.145) + (.154) + (.0492) = $1.9874. $1.9874 is the per thousand tax rate for the house in our example.