Home/Compliance/§ 26.17

§ 26.17: the property tax database

The one website duty that reaches every Texas appraisal district, whatever the county's size.

Applies to
Every appraisal district
Maintained by
The chief appraiser
Update standard
Continuously, as data arrives
Named for
The county, not the district

What it requires

The chief appraiser of each appraisal district has to create and maintain a property tax database. Unlike § 6.17 and § 25.01(d), there is no population threshold here. Every district is in.

A few features of the requirement end up shaping how a district's site gets built.

It carries the county's name

The statute specifies the database is identified by the name of the county where the district is established, not by the name of the appraisal district. Taxpayers are looking for their county. This is the Truth in Taxation experience most Texans actually encounter.

It updates continuously

The standard is continuous updating as preliminary and revised data become available from the designated officers or employees of the taxing units. Not a periodic refresh. That is a tighter standard than the weekly floor in § 25.01(d), over a different dataset.

It has to be public and searchable

The database must be accessible to the public and searchable by property address and by owner, subject to certain restrictions.

It carries rates and hearings, not just values

Property identification, market and taxable values, the taxing units involved, no-new-revenue and voter-approval rates, proposed rates, the resulting tax amounts, hearing dates and locations, contact information for submitting comments, and links to related sites.

A common mix-up

The § 26.17 database and the § 25.01(d) appraisal record posting are separate duties over separate datasets on separate schedules. Satisfying one does nothing for the other. A district in a county of 120,000 or more owes both.

Where it usually lives

In most districts the database runs through the CAMA or Truth in Taxation vendor rather than the district's own website, and the site's job is to link to it clearly and correctly. That is a legitimate architecture and the one Valorem AI assumes.

The failure is rarely the database. It is the link. Buried, mislabeled, pointing at a retired URL. A link that broke six months ago is a problem nobody on staff will notice, because staff do not click it.

How Valorem AI handles it

Links are records in a Links directory rather than text typed into a page, so the same destination can appear in navigation, on the Resources page, and inside a notice while being maintained in exactly one place. Change it once, it changes everywhere. Property search and tax database portals are treated as linked systems of record and never ingested, so parcel and tax data stay where they belong.

The Comptroller publishes its own database and website requirements guidance, which is the place to check specifics.

One place to maintain every statutory link

See how a Valorem district site keeps required links correct across every page that references them.