Five New Texas Laws Start Tuesday. Two of Them Only Start Partway.

The Legislature met in 2025. Most of what it passed took effect last September. A smaller batch was written to wait a year, and today is the day it stops waiting.

Here is what that means at an address in Greater Magnolia.

The man at your door selling solar

Senate Bill 1036 covers residential solar retail transactions. The bulk of it has been law since September 1, 2025. What starts today is the registration piece: the sections that require solar companies and the people who sell for them to hold an occupational registration with the state.

The rest of the bill was already working. A buyer gets five days to cancel a residential solar purchase or lease without a penalty, and any loan attached to the deal has to be canceled along with it. That last clause is the one that matters. A cancellation that leaves the financing standing is not a cancellation.

The law also bars a salesperson from suggesting they are affiliated with your utility or with a government agency when they are not, and from ignoring a posted no-soliciting sign.

New rooftops are the product here, and this county has been producing new rooftops for a decade. If somebody knocks this fall, the registration is now a fair question to ask on the porch.

Fixing your own equipment

House Bill 2963 is the right-to-repair law, and it takes effect in full today. It covers the diagnosis, maintenance and repair of certain digital electronic equipment. Manufacturers have to make parts, tools and repair documentation available to owners and to independent repair shops on the same terms they give their own authorized providers.

The exclusion list is long and worth reading before anyone gets excited. Medical devices, video game consoles, home appliances, motor vehicles, farm equipment, and industrial and aerospace equipment are all outside it. Manufacturers are not required to hand over trade secrets, or tools whose purpose is bypassing security.

So it is not everything in the house. It is the laptop, the tablet, the phone. For the independent shops in Tomball and Magnolia that have spent years being told a part is not available to them, it is a change in footing.

Paying volunteer firefighters

House Bill 5424 deals with volunteer firefighter compensation limits, and it also takes effect today. It lets a department pay a volunteer firefighter up to twenty percent of what a full-time firefighter at that department makes in a year without the volunteer losing that status.

Southwest Montgomery County is covered in large part by departments that lean on volunteers and part-paid staff. A ceiling on what those people can be paid is not an abstraction out here. It is a recruiting number.

Two more, and one of them barely counts yet

Senate Bill 785 concerns the regulation of new HUD-code manufactured housing. It takes effect today.

House Bill 1056 is the gold and silver bill, and this is where the headlines have gotten ahead of the calendar. It recognizes gold and silver specie as legal tender and sets up a transactional currency based on them. Almost all of it takes effect May 1, 2027. One section, 2116.101 of the Government Code, starts today. Nobody is paying for gas in silver this week.

Accepting the metal stays optional for any business either way. A law making something legal tender does not oblige the counter to take it.

Why the split dates keep happening

A bill can carry more than one effective date. The Legislature does it when a piece of a law needs an agency to build something first, a registry, a rule set, a payment system. The rule arrives on one date and the machinery that enforces it arrives on another.

It also means a plain sentence like "the solar law takes effect September 1" can be true and misleading at the same time. Read to the end of the effective-date clause. That is where the exceptions live.