The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has issued an update on property value data and the frozen levy hold harmless methodology. TEA is aware of a property tax data issue that is impacting reported district funding levels for the 2025-2026 school year. No immediate action is required at this time, and updates will flow automatically as part of property tax data recertification and a subsequent SOF run(s) next week.
This update addresses several ongoing issues related to property value data used by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) in connection with the frozen levy hold harmless provisions under TEC, §48.2542.
Issues were determined to be in the following areas:
- Vendor-Related Data
- Self-Report (SR) Calculation Methodology
- Aggregated SR Data Submissions
These issues will be resolved through actions of the Comptroller and an update to TEA’s calculation approach.
Beginning in tax year 2025 (school year 2025-2026), once the TEA receives recertified data from the Comptroller’s office, SOF reports will reflect the revised methodology.
Specifically:
- SR0706 (current law actual levy) will be displayed as the difference between SR0705 (calculated levy) and SR0707 (current law frozen levy loss).
- SR0716 (prior law actual levy) will be displayed as the difference between SR0705 (calculated levy) and SR0717 (prior law frozen levy loss).
What districts will notice:
- SR0706 and SR0716 can no longer be used as standalone reported values.
- Moving forward, these values will be derived from SR0705, SR0707, and SR0717.
- Total levy loss amounts should more accurately reflect the impacts of tax rate compression on the frozen levy.
These updates will produce a consistent, statewide methodology. Assuming SR data are reported correctly, the revised approach should align frozen levy loss to the property value loss (T17 minus T2 divided by the total tax rate) and accurately represent each district’s frozen levy loss.
The full communication from TEA can be found here.
