Nueces County Property Taxes
How to deal with the necessary evil of property taxes in Port Aransas and Corpus Christi, Texas: A how to research property taxes guide.

In today’s day and age information is the key resource in any business transaction. Make no mistake about it, buying a home, Condo or other real estate is in fact the most important business deal many people will ever face. There is good news however: never before in history has the average citizen had the power of the internet search engines to enable them to acquire piles of information on the wanted property, its developer, location and value. This article will deal with property taxes.

As many of you already know Texas has no income taxes and the state’s primary source of income is sales and property taxes, I will attempt in layman’s terms to show you how to find out the exact total tax rate for a specific property you are interested in.

Generally Texas tax rates are expressed in dollar amounts per thousand dollars of appraised value. For example if I told you your total tax rate for your property is $1.50 that would be a dollar fifty for each thousand dollars of appraised value. If your property appraised for $100,000 your property taxes would be ($1.50) X ($100,000) =$1500 per year then divide by 12 months in a year would equal $125.00 a month. 

Heck that’s simple you might say and it is. However, in Texas there are many taxing units that make it difficult to determine the exact dollar amount of the tax rate on a specific piece of property. These units consist of cities, counties, special taxing units (fire, ambulance, police, and community colleges) and school districts. So the location of a piece of property within these districts determines the tax rate for that particular piece of property.

Ok with that behind us let's by example look up a specific piece of property in Nueces County, Texas. You may not realize it but the amount paid by citizens as property tax is a matter of public record and available on the internet. Yes you can look up Uncle Bills house or that loudmouth down at the factory’s house and see what it appraises for and how much the taxes are and whether Uncle Bill has paid his taxes. Nosey bunches aren’t we? Let’s get started.

If you click on this link Nueces County Appraisal District you will see a page like this:

In the first image on the left you will see a list of searches. We will click on Owner Search for this example. If you wanted to search by the property's address you would of course click on the “search by address” button.   Now looking at the page to the bottom left you may notice that you need the owner’s name to search for a property. You can get that information from the realtor or if the realtor doesn’t want to give you the owner's name at least you can get the address. So whose house /property are we going to look up? Might as well be some politician I suppose so let me suggest the Mayor of Corpus Christi, Texas, the Hon. Henry Garret. On the page where it says search by select owners name type in Garret, Henry and hit the search button.

Once you hit the search button you will see a page listing all the properties attached to that name. Select the property you are interested in viewing by clicking on the Property ID number. Now the purpose of looking at this screen is to find out how many and which taxing districts the property is located in. Scroll down to the section "Entity Codes:" So the property is located in the taxing districts (called Entity Codes) of the City of Corpus Christi, Nueces County, Del Mar Jr. College, the Farm to Market Road district, Corpus Christi Independent School District and the Hospital District. Now to arrive at the total tax rate for the property we must add up all the districts tax rates. Note this districts will vary in name and number depending on the location of the property.

Cameron County Appraisal District