Erick C. Jones Jr., PhD, PE

Projects · Geospatial and Infrastructure Analysis

Tarrant County Land Value: What Each Acre Pays

How much property tax each acre of Tarrant County produces, and why some areas raise less: tax rates, how much is built, or what the buildings are worth.

Animated 3D view of Tarrant County turning slowly. Hexagonal columns rise from the map, their height and color showing tax per acre, then market value per acre; downtown Fort Worth's columns stand tallest, with a few tall columns near DFW Airport and Arlington.
The same hexagons in 3D, drawn with hexmap-web: column height and color show tax per acre, then market value per acre, as the view turns.Rendered by the SEAR Lab from public Tarrant Appraisal District, Tarrant County Tax Office and U.S. Census data (the lab's Tarrant County analysis, release v0.1.0); drawn with sear-labs/hexmap-web

In plain English

Fort Worth and its neighbours pay for roads, water and sewer lines out of property tax, so where that tax comes from matters. This project asks how much each acre of Tarrant County produces, and why some areas raise less than others: lower tax rates, less building on the land, or lower-value building. In 2026 the lab rebuilt the analysis from scratch as a reproducible Python pipeline that joins the 2025 appraisal roll to 660,267 taxable parcels, computes tax from each taxing unit's adopted rates, checks it against the tax actually billed, and reports only area totals.

Property tax from all taxing units came to about $2,307 per resident county-wide and $2,150 in Fort Worth, but $1,070 in Fort Worth's council District 11. East Fort Worth (Districts 5, 8 and 11) raises 0.69 times the city's average tax per acre, mostly because its land carries less building and lower-value building, not lower rates. District 11's low effective tax rate comes mostly from appraisal caps: 42% of its single-family homes are capped, against 16% in the rest of the city. Some figures are estimates: a few taxing units collect their own taxes, Northwest ISD is approximated from its posted rate, some special districts are missing, and council-district populations are 2020 Census counts scaled to 2025.

Main points

  • About 384,000 taxable acres produce an average of $13,508 in property tax per acre.
  • Single-family homes pay 61% of the county's property tax on 31% of its land.
  • The rebuild fixed two earlier errors: appraised value had been reported as tax, and records were matched on owners' mailing addresses rather than parcels.
  • Equal-area hexagons compare places of different shapes fairly, and the lab's open-source hexmap-web library draws them as interactive maps.
  • Next is the cost side: whether the tax each area raises covers the roads, water and sewer lines that serve it.
Hexagon heat map of Tarrant County, Texas, in 1-square-mile hexagons, colored by property tax per acre in 2025 from pale yellow (about $2,000 an acre or less) through orange and red to near-black ($64,000 or more). The darkest hexagons are downtown Fort Worth and the area south-west of it. Most of the urban county, including North Richland Hills, Grapevine, Euless, Arlington, Grand Prairie and Mansfield, is red to purple; east and south-east Fort Worth is orange; the rural west and south are pale yellow. Hatched gray hexagons at DFW Airport are entirely tax-exempt land. Outlines mark the seven cities over 50,000 people.
Property tax per acre across Tarrant County, tax year 2025, in 1-square-mile hexagons. Darker is higher, on a log scale; hatched hexagons are entirely tax-exempt land. Each hexagon totals its parcels, so no single property is shown.Rendered by the SEAR Lab from public Tarrant Appraisal District, Tarrant County Tax Office and U.S. Census data (the lab's Tarrant County analysis, release v0.1.0)

Papers, code and materials

People

  • Erick C. Jones Jr., PhD, PEPrincipal Investigator · SEAR Lab directorin
  • Ritesh MuralidharStudent researcher (2024): earlier work on the question
  • Ravi PrakashaStudent researcher (2024): earlier work on the question
  • Darshan Ujjini MallikarjunaStudent researcher (2024): earlier work on the question
  • Lokesh Ram HariramStudent researcher (2024): earlier work on the questionin
  • Varun KulkarniStudent researcher (2025): earlier work on the questionin
  • Pratik GhimireStudent researcher (2025): earlier work on the question

Also contributed: Harshitha Krishna Rao (2024) and Devadharshini Udayakumar (2025). Profiles marked in link to LinkedIn. More past and present lab members are on the SEAR Lab team page.

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