Fort Worth Passed a Million People. Here's What It Did to the Tax Bill.
Growth
Growth
Fort Worth passed a million people. As of the Census Bureau’s latest estimates the city has 1,028,117 residents, which makes it the tenth largest city in the United States. That happened quietly, the way most things here happen, and it changes the math for anyone buying.
I want to give you an honest version of what the growth is, what it brought with it, and what it has done to the cost of owning something here — including the part that shows up every October in an envelope from the appraisal district.
You’ll see Fort Worth called the fastest-growing city in the country. That was true in some years; it isn’t the current picture, and the accurate version is more useful anyway.
Between July 2024 and July 2025 the city added 19,512 residents. That’s the second-largest numeric gain of any city in the country, behind Charlotte. By percentage Fort Worth doesn’t crack the top fifteen — that list is dominated by much smaller places, including Celina up the road at almost 25% in a single year, which is what happens when a town of a few thousand adds a few thousand more.
So Fort Worth isn’t growing explosively. It’s growing steadily, at scale, and it has been for a long time. For a buyer, that distinction matters. Explosive percentage growth in a small suburb tends to mean new rooftops, thin comparable sales, and values that depend on the next phase selling well. Steady absorption into an established city of a million means deeper sales data, more stable pricing, and neighborhoods whose character is already set.
The Cultural District is the part of Fort Worth that surprises people who haven’t spent time here. The Kimbell, the Modern, and the Amon Carter sit within walking distance of each other, which is an unusual concentration for a city this size. The Zoo and TCU anchor the same general area.
Dickies Arena, which opened in 2019, has turned into one of the busiest venues of its size in the country, and the booking range is genuinely broad — bull riding one week and a stadium act the next. The Crescent Hotel gave the Cultural District a hotel that locals actually use, which is rarer than it sounds.
The restaurant scene has gotten materially better, and not just larger. Tim Love has been the anchor here for years, and the arrivals since have raised the ceiling rather than simply adding seats.
None of that is why you’d buy a house. It’s why people who move here tend to stay, which is what eventually shows up in values.
Here’s where I’m more useful than a general enthusiasm piece. I’m a Certified Residential Appraiser as well as a broker, and a meaningful share of my phone calls are from homeowners asking for help protesting their assessed value. I see what the growth did from that side.
Rising values are pleasant when you’re selling and expensive when you’re staying. Texas has no state income tax, and property tax carries the load instead — so when values climb the way they have here, longtime residents on fixed incomes feel it first and hardest. That has been the real cost of this growth, and for several years the state talked about it more than it did anything about it.
That finally changed, and if you’ve been running on old information you should update it.
In 2025 the legislature passed and the governor signed a package of relief, and on November 4, 2025 Texas voters approved the constitutional amendment behind it with about 79% of the vote. The headline items:
Roughly $50 billion was committed to property tax relief in that session. It is the largest change to this in a long time and it is a real reduction for most homeowners.
Now the appraiser’s footnotes, which is where people get surprised.
The exemption applies to school district taxes. School taxes are the largest line on most Tarrant County bills, so this is meaningful — but the city, the county, the hospital district and the college district each set their own rates and their own exemptions. Your total bill doesn’t fall by anything like the full percentage you might expect from the headline.
It reduces what you’re taxed on, not what you’re worth. Your assessed value can still rise. The exemption subtracts from the taxable base; it doesn’t cap appreciation. The separate 10% annual cap on homestead assessed-value increases is what limits the climb, and it’s a different mechanism.
You have to have the homestead exemption on file. I still find owners — usually people who bought recently — who never filed. If you closed in the last couple of years, check. It’s free, and it’s the single largest thing most homeowners can do about their bill.
Growth is not free. Longtime residents in neighborhoods that appreciated fastest are being priced out by the tax bill rather than the mortgage, which is a particularly frustrating way to lose a house you already own. Traffic has gotten worse. Some of the character that brought people here is being renovated out of the neighborhoods that had it.
And buying here is harder than the national headlines suggest, because the competition is uneven. The desirable pockets move quickly; other areas sit. A market average tells you almost nothing about the six blocks you’re actually shopping.
The advantage Fort Worth still has is that it’s a city of a million people that hasn’t finished acting like a smaller one. You can get into the Cultural District, downtown, or an established neighborhood at numbers that would be impossible in a comparably sized city elsewhere.
What I’d tell you to do is what I’d do myself: look at the tax bill alongside the price, not after it. Two homes at the same price in different districts, with different exemption histories, are not the same monthly obligation, and the difference compounds for as long as you own.
That’s the kind of thing I check before my clients write an offer, because I spent fifteen years valuing property in this market before I ever listed one.
Call or text (682) 207-4310, or send me a note. Happy to look at a specific neighborhood with you.
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I've trained three other appraisers in my market and also own and manage rental property in Tarrant and Dallas counties which keeps me in the know on home ownership costs, contributory value for improvements, and deriving values using the income approach for investment purposes.