The City Cut Its Tax Rate By About Half in Five Years. It Also Took the Legal Maximum Three Years Running.
By P.J. Carver · August 11, 2026
Two true things that sound like they cancel each other out. They do not, and the city's own numbers explain why.
The City of Magnolia publishes a Truth in Taxation table on its own website, going back to 2010. It is a dry grid of numbers with no commentary attached. Read down the columns and it tells a fairly interesting story about the last few years.
Start with the headline. In tax year 2020 the city's adopted rate was 45.29 cents per $100 of value. By 2024, the most recent year on the table, it was 25.09 cents. That is a drop of about 45 percent in four years, and as the last section shows it kept falling after that. Nobody should wave that away. It is a large move, and it is the city's own reporting of it.
Now read the last column.
Texas gives every city a voter-approval rate, which is the highest rate it may adopt before an election can be triggered. In 2022 the city adopted 38.13 cents and its voter-approval rate was 38.13 cents. In 2023 it adopted 29.48 cents against a voter-approval rate of 29.48 cents. In 2024 it adopted 25.09 cents against a voter-approval rate of 25.09 cents. Three years in a row, the adopted rate and the ceiling are the same number to the hundredth of a cent.
That is legal, and it is common. Plenty of Texas cities set the rate right at the line every year, and doing so is not evidence of anything improper. It is simply worth knowing that for three straight years the council took the most the law allowed it to take without asking anyone at the ballot box.
Then the table complicates the easy version of that.
There is a second benchmark on the table, the no-new-revenue rate. That is the rate that would bring in the same money this year as last year from property that existed in both years. Above it, the city collects more from the same houses. Below it, less.
In 2023 the city's voter-approval rate was 29.48 cents while its no-new-revenue rate was 33.14 cents. The ceiling was below the break-even line. So even taking the legal maximum that year, the city pulled in less from existing property than it had the year before. Anyone who wants to read three years at the ceiling as three years of grabbing has to account for that, and it does not fit.
The other two years cut the other way. In 2022 the adopted rate of 38.13 cents sat well above a no-new-revenue rate of 26.64 cents. In 2024 the adopted 25.09 cents sat just above a no-new-revenue 24.92 cents, a thin margin but on the collecting side of the line.
None of which tells you what happened to your actual bill, and this is the part that trips up every conversation about tax rates in this county. A rate is half the equation. The bill is the rate multiplied by what the appraisal district says your property is worth. A rate that falls 45 percent against an appraisal that climbs can still leave you writing a larger check. Falling rate is not the same sentence as falling bill, and a city can honestly report the first while a homeowner honestly reports the second.
One practical note for anyone who goes looking. The Truth in Taxation table runs 2010 through 2024, so the rate you are actually being charged right now is not on it. Here it is. On September 16, 2025 the council adopted 22.77 cents for the 2025 tax year, down from 25.09.
That number is worth sitting with, because it breaks the pattern this story is built on. Five weeks before the vote the council had proposed 24.54 cents. It adopted a rate below its own proposal. In the three years before that, the adopted rate landed exactly on the ceiling every time.
And measured from the start rather than the middle, the fall is bigger than the four-year figure suggests. From 45.29 cents in 2020 to 22.77 cents in 2025 is a cut of roughly half in five years.
The next one gets set in the coming weeks. The city held a budget workshop on July 11, and Texas cities adopt a budget and a tax rate before the fiscal year turns over on October 1. Last year the council approved its proposed rate on August 12 and adopted the final number on September 16, which puts the equivalent votes right about now. The hearing notices are the thing to watch for. They are the only point in the process where a resident gets to say anything before the vote.
Editor's note on format. We chose straight reporting rather than our two-column both-sides layout because none of the numbers here are in dispute. They are the city's own published figures, and the statutory definitions of the no-new-revenue and voter-approval rates come from the Texas Property Tax Code. When the council proposes a specific rate for the coming year and residents disagree about whether to adopt it, that story gets the two-column treatment.
Sources: the City of Magnolia's "Tax Rate Information" page, the Truth in Taxation summary published under Texas Property Tax Code Section 26.16, which supplies every adopted rate, maintenance-and-operations rate, debt rate, no-new-revenue rate and voter-approval rate cited here, for tax years 2010 through 2024; the city's "Budget Workshop Notice" for July 11, 2026, posted to cityofmagnolia.com; and Community Impact's Tomball-Magnolia reporting of August 15 and September 23, 2025 for the proposed 24.54-cent rate, the adopted 22.77-cent rate for tax year 2025 and the September 16, 2025 adoption date, which post-date the published table. Whether the 2025 adopted rate also equalled that year's voter-approval rate is not answered by the table as published and is not asserted here. The statutory definitions of the no-new-revenue and voter-approval rates are quoted from the same page. Adopting a rate at the voter-approval rate is lawful. Corrections to newsroom@themagnoliastandard.news.