These three sections sit next to each other in the Code and do quite different jobs. Districts tend to collapse them into one idea called "confidentiality," which is usually how the posting restriction gets missed.
| Section | Title | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| § 25.025 | Confidentiality of Certain Home Address Information | Home addresses of listed individuals who have elected protection |
| § 25.026 | Confidentiality of Certain Shelter Center and Sexual Assault Program Address Information | Addresses of family violence shelters, sexual assault programs, and trafficking victim shelters |
| § 25.027 | Restriction on Posting Information on Internet Website | Residence photos, sketches and floor plans, and anything showing an owner's age |
None of them carry a population threshold. They apply to every district and to anything it publishes.
§ 25.025: addresses, by election
Information in appraisal records that identifies a covered individual's home address is confidential and available only for official use by the appraisal district, the state, the Comptroller, and taxing units.
The protection is not automatic, with one exception. The individual elects it on the form the Comptroller prescribes, and the election stands until they rescind it in writing. Federal and state judges and their spouses are covered automatically from the date the Office of Court Administration notifies the district.
The list of who qualifies is long and the Legislature keeps adding to it. Current and former peace officers and their families. County jailers. Victims of family violence, sexual assault, stalking, or trafficking. Federal and state judges and their family members. Prosecutors. Combat veterans. Firefighters and emergency medical personnel. Elected officials.
Because the list grows, a district that hard codes its understanding of who counts will drift. The question is never whether someone seems like they should qualify. It is whether there is a valid election on file.
§ 25.026: shelter addresses
Same confidentiality treatment, applied to the addresses of family violence shelters, sexual assault programs, and shelter centers for trafficking victims. No election required.
§ 25.027: the one about your website
This is the section that speaks directly to what a district publishes online, and it is not about addresses at all.
Texas Tax Code § 25.027, in substance
Information in appraisal records may not be posted on the Internet if it is a photograph, sketch, or floor plan of an improvement to real property designed primarily for use as a human residence, or if it indicates the age of a property owner, including information indicating that an owner is 65 years of age or older.Exceptions, as amended by SB 973 effective September 1, 2025: an aerial photograph that depicts more than one separately owned building; a street-level photograph of only the exterior of a building; and a field record or overhead sketch that shows only building outlines, general landscape features such as ponds, pools, and walls, and the dimensions of or distances between them.
Residence photos, sketches, and floor plans are out, apart from the narrow exceptions above. The 2025 amendment lets a district show a street-level exterior shot or an outline sketch; anything that shows the inside or layout of a home stays off. That still reaches straight into the property detail pages plenty of districts publish. Age is out too, and that sweeps in the over-65 exemption status sitting on record displays all over the state, put there by people who never had reason to think about it.
Why this one is a systems problem
Every other obligation on a CAD website is about publishing something. This one is about reliably not publishing something, which is a much harder guarantee to make.
The ways it goes wrong are ordinary:
- A protected address rides along in a dataset posted under § 25.01(d) because the weekly export skipped the filter.
- Staff paste a list into a page by hand, and the filter never runs, because the content is plain text now.
- Over-65 status shows up in a record display nobody audited against § 25.027.
- An uploaded PDF, a scanned agenda, or a meeting packet carries the information inside a document nobody reread.
- A new election gets filed and the pages already published never get revisited.
A rule applied by a person at the moment of publishing will eventually be applied wrong. It has to run against the data, every time the page renders.
What Valorem AI does here
Parcel, exemption, and appraisal records never enter the platform today. The importer never ingests parcel or tax data, and property search portals stay as links, so protected addresses and exemption documents stay in the system that already governs them. When property search ships on Valorem, the § 25.025 and § 25.027 rules will run against the data as it is loaded, not at the keyboard.
Admin changes are written to an audit log, so a district reviewing an incident can establish what was published and when it changed.
Not legal advice
This describes the statutes and how the product is built. Whether a specific record can be posted is a call for the chief appraiser and the district's counsel.