Most guidance on government website compliance is written for cities. Appraisal districts are not cities. A CAD's duties come out of the Property Tax Code, they turn on county population rather than anything about the district itself, and two of them are new since September 1, 2025, when House Bill 1533 took effect.
Each one below has its own page with the statutory text and what it means in practice.
The six obligations
| Requirement | Applies to | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Have a website at all | Counties of 120,000+ | Tax Code § 6.17 |
| Post appraisal records, refreshed weekly | Counties of 120,000+ | Tax Code § 25.01(d) |
| Property tax database | Every district | Tax Code § 26.17 |
| Electronic protest filing, homestead only | Counties of 500,000+ | Tax Code § 41.415 |
| Withhold protected addresses; restrict what you post | Every district | Tax Code §§ 25.025–25.027 |
| WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility | Every district, on a federal clock | 28 CFR Part 35 |
Three unrelated population tests
Whether you must run a website at all turns on 120,000. Whether you must take homestead protests electronically turns on 500,000. Your accessibility deadline turns on 50,000, and that one is a federal number with nothing to do with the Tax Code. Clearing one test tells you nothing about the others.
Which population number counts
For the Tax Code brackets, it is the decennial census. Government Code § 311.005(3) defines population as the figure shown by the most recent federal decennial census, so the 120,000 and 500,000 tests run off 2020 and will not move again until the 2030 count is certified.
That is worth knowing because it cuts the other way from how people assume these things work. A county whose annual estimates crossed 120,000 in 2024 did not pick up a § 6.17 obligation when that happened. A district's status here is stable for a decade at a time.
What changed in 2025
Until September 2025 no Texas statute required an appraisal district to have a website. Most had one regardless, and the moment a district ran one, other provisions attached to it. HB 1533 closed the gap for larger counties and added a posting duty on top.
- § 6.17 makes a website mandatory for districts in counties of 120,000 or more. It is one sentence.
- § 25.01(d) requires those same districts to post their completed appraisal records, minus anything confidential by law, and refresh the posting at least once a week to reflect changes in appraised value.
The second one is the one that changes how a district has to work. A weekly obligation is not a publishing task, it is a data pipeline. That page covers what it means day to day.
If your county is under 120,000
You are not required to run a website. The other duties do not disappear though. They attach to whatever you do run. § 26.17 applies to every district regardless of size. §§ 25.025 through 25.027 restrict what you post whether or not you were required to post anything. And the ADA Title II rule reaches every public entity that runs a site, with smaller entities getting a later deadline, not an exemption.
In practice nearly every Texas CAD runs a site anyway, because taxpayers expect one and because the § 26.17 database has to be reachable from somewhere.
How Valorem AI handles it
The platform is built around these particular statutes, not around generic government website practice. Data blocks for notices, board members, staff, meetings, and forms pull live from the district's records, so a weekly posting duty is satisfied by the data changing instead of by someone remembering to re-upload a file. Confidentiality runs as a posting rule, so nobody has to make the call at the keyboard. Accessibility is built into the template layer, so it does not depend on what an editor pastes into a page.
Not legal advice
This describes what the statutes say and how the product is designed. It is not a certification and not a legal opinion. Your configuration should be reviewed against these requirements by your own counsel, and safemode IT is not a substitute for that.