Falling behind on Travis County property taxes is not a single event. It is a schedule — a series of dated steps, each one adding a defined cost, and each one leaving fewer options than the step before. This guide walks the schedule end to end: what February costs, why July 1 is the expensive cliff, how Travis County's monthly tax sale actually works, and which legal off-ramps are still open at each stage.
Travis County property taxes become delinquent on February 1, carrying an immediate 7 percent penalty and interest charge that climbs to 18 percent by July 1, when an additional collection penalty of up to 20 percent may attach. Travis County does not sell tax lien certificates — it sells tax deeds at monthly online foreclosure auctions conducted through RealAuction. Owners retain a statutory right of redemption after the sale: two years for a residence homestead or agricultural land, 180 days for everything else. BuyHousesInCash works with Austin-area owners who need to clear a delinquent tax balance before a judgment or sale forecloses the option.
If you're behind on property taxes in Austin, you have more time than you think but it costs more every month. Taxes go delinquent February 1, penalties jump again July 1, and only after a lawsuit and judgment can the county sell your home at a monthly auction.
Property tax in Texas runs on a calendar that almost never changes. A lien attaches to every parcel on January 1 for that year's taxes, before anyone has received a bill. Appraisal notices arrive in the spring from the Travis Central Appraisal District. Taxing units — the county, the City of Austin, Austin ISD or one of the dozen other school districts, the community college district, and in many neighborhoods a municipal utility district or public improvement district — set their rates over the late summer. Bills are mailed in October. Payment is due by January 31.
On February 1 the bill is delinquent. Texas Tax Code Section 31.02 sets that date, and the Travis County Tax Office notes the one exception worth remembering: if January 31 falls on a weekend or a holiday, the delinquency date rolls to the next business day. There is no grace period beyond that, and postmark rules are unforgiving. The Tax Assessor-Collector does not have discretion to waive what follows; the office says so directly on its own delinquency page.
What makes Austin distinctive is not the calendar, which is statewide, but the composition of the bill. A large share of Travis, Williamson and Hays County homes sit inside overlapping special districts layered on top of city and school taxes. An owner in a newer subdivision in Pflugerville, Round Rock or Cedar Park may be carrying a MUD levy established under Water Code Chapter 54 or a PID assessment under Local Government Code Chapter 372 in addition to everything else. Those obligations do not vanish because the underlying mortgage is current, and they frequently explain why a household that budgeted for a familiar tax figure finds itself short.
Texas Tax Code Section 33.01 governs the arithmetic, and the Travis County Tax Office publishes the resulting schedule month by month. It is worth reading as a table rather than a paragraph, because the shape of it is the whole story:
After July the penalty stops growing. It is capped at 12 percent. Interest, however, does not stop: it continues at 1 percent per month, so the combined figure reaches 24 percent twelve months after delinquency and keeps climbing by a point a month after that. A $9,000 unpaid tax bill left alone from February through the following January becomes roughly $11,160 in taxes, penalty and interest — before any legal costs enter the picture.
Two features of this schedule matter more than the headline percentages. First, the increments are monthly and automatic, which means a partial payment made on the 28th and a partial payment made on the 2nd of the next month are charged very differently. Second, the percentages apply to the balance, so an owner who can pay most of the bill and carry a small remainder is in a far better position than the raw rate suggests. Paying down principal before a month rolls over is the single cheapest move available at this stage.
The step that surprises Austin owners is not February. It is July 1. Under Texas Tax Code Section 33.07, a taxing unit that has contracted with a delinquent tax attorney under Section 6.30 may impose an additional penalty to defray the cost of collection on taxes that became delinquent on or after February 1 and remain unpaid on July 1. The additional penalty is capped at the compensation specified in that attorney contract, which in practice across Texas commonly runs to 20 percent of the base tax, penalty and interest.
Stack that on the 18 percent already accrued and a bill that started at $9,000 in January can stand near $12,700 by mid-July. The statute does contain one protection worth knowing: Section 33.07(d) requires the collector to deliver a notice of the delinquency and of the penalty to the property owner at least 30 and not more than 60 days before July 1. If that notice never arrived, the timing and delivery of it is a fair question to raise with the collector. Section 33.07 also bars a taxing unit that imposes this penalty from separately recovering attorney's fees in a later collection suit on the same taxes — it is one or the other, not both.
Because the exact additional-penalty percentage is set by each taxing unit's own attorney contract rather than by statute, do not assume a number. It is printed on the delinquent statement. Ask the Travis County Tax Office for a written payoff figure good through a specific date before you plan around any calculation, including this one.
Delinquency in the Austin metro has never been evenly distributed, and the drivers have changed noticeably over the past several years. In earlier cycles, tax delinquency clustered with income — it tracked job loss and medical debt in long-tenured neighborhoods east of I-35 and in the older unincorporated pockets of the county. That pattern still exists. But a second, newer pattern has been layered on top of it, and it involves households that are not poor.
The mechanism is appraisal growth colliding with fixed income. Texas Tax Code Section 23.23 caps the annual increase in the taxable value of a residence homestead at 10 percent above the prior year, plus new improvements. In a metro where market values rose steeply, that cap does not prevent a tax bill from rising — it only slows the rate at which the taxable value catches up to the market. A retiree who bought in Hyde Park or Travis Heights decades ago can hold an enormous amount of equity and still find the annual bill outrunning a fixed pension. Long-tenured owners in appreciating central neighborhoods have become a recognizable share of delinquency filings for exactly this reason.
Inherited property is the third recurring pattern, and in our experience it is the most common single cause of a multi-year delinquency. When an owner dies and the estate is not formally administered, no one holds clear authority to pay, refinance or sell. The bill keeps accruing at 1 percent a month while heirs in three states argue about what to do. We wrote about how that plays out in the probate courts in our guide to Austin probate property volume; the tax consequences are simply the same delay measured in money.
One genuinely positive change deserves mention, because a great deal of published Austin tax content has not caught up to it. Texas voters approved Propositions 11 and 13 on November 4, 2025. Proposition 13 raised the general residence homestead exemption for school district taxes from $100,000 to $140,000, and Proposition 11 raised the additional exemption for owners who are 65 or older or disabled from $10,000 to $60,000 — a combined $200,000 school-tax exemption for qualifying seniors. The implementing legislation from the 89th Legislature, Senate Bill 4 and Senate Bill 23, applied the increases to the 2025 tax year contingent on voter approval, which is why many Travis County bills mailed in October 2025 showed two provisional totals. If you are behind on a 2025 bill and have not checked which figure actually applied to you, check before you pay anything.
There is a related and frequently missed lever. Texas Tax Code Section 11.431 requires the chief appraiser to accept a late residence homestead exemption application filed up to two years after the delinquency date for the taxes in question. An owner who never filed for the homestead exemption, or who lost it after a transfer, can sometimes reduce a delinquent balance retroactively rather than merely arranging to pay it. For an heir occupying an inherited house, Section 33.06(h) treats an heir property owner who qualifies the property as a residence homestead as the sole owner for deferral purposes — which matters a great deal in the next section.
Delinquency alone does not cost anyone a house. A tax sale in Texas requires a lawsuit and a judgment, and that process is slower and more visible than most owners fear. Understanding the sequence is what converts panic into a usable timeline.
After the July 1 penalty attaches, the delinquent account is typically referred to the taxing units' contracted collection firm. Demand letters follow. If the balance remains unpaid, the taxing unit files suit under Texas Tax Code Section 33.41 to foreclose the tax lien and obtain a personal judgment. Suit can be filed at any time after the tax becomes delinquent, and Section 33.42 requires the petition to include all delinquent years on the property, not merely the one that triggered the filing.
The owner is served and has the ordinary opportunity to answer. Other taxing units with claims are joined under Section 33.44. Travis County, like other large Texas counties, refers many of these suits to a master under the Section 33.71 procedure. If the taxing unit prevails, the court enters judgment for the taxes, penalties, interest and costs, and issues an order of sale under Section 33.53. Section 33.48 is where the practical damage is done: the taxing unit recovers its costs and expenses, including the cost of serving process, filing fees, the attorney ad litem's fee for any defendant served by publication, and the cost of a title search. Those amounts attach to the property and are recovered out of the sale.
The elapsed time from delinquency to sale is highly variable. It is measured in many months and frequently in years, particularly where heirs must be identified or citation by publication is required. That variability is a genuine risk in both directions: an owner who assumes the process is imminent may make a panicked decision, and an owner who assumes it will take forever may discover a sale date with weeks of notice. If you want a structured view of where your own account sits, our tax sale timeline tool maps the statutory steps against dates, and the foreclosure timeline tool does the same for a lender's non-judicial track, which runs on a completely separate and much faster clock under Property Code Section 51.002. Owners facing both at once should read our companion piece on Austin foreclosure trends, because the mortgage timeline is usually the binding constraint.
This is the point where most nationally syndicated content goes wrong about Texas, and the Travis County Tax Office corrects it in plain language on its own site: the tax office does not sell tax liens. Texas is a deed state. The county sells the property, and the winning bidder receives a Constable's Deed — not a certificate that makes an investor the lienholder waiting to be paid off. If you have been told an investor "bought the lien" on your Austin house, that is either a Section 32.06 tax lien transfer, which is a different and voluntary transaction discussed below, or it is simply wrong.
The mechanics in Travis County as of 2026 are these. The judicial tax sale is held on the first Tuesday of each month, the statewide sale date, between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Travis County conducts its sales online through RealAuction rather than by open outcry at the courthouse steps; bidders must register both with RealAuction and with the tax office, submitting the bidder registration form and a $10 fee online at least five business days before the sale date. Within about four weeks of a successful bid, the county mails the Constable's Deed to the purchaser.
The minimum bid is not the market value of the house. It consists of the tax, penalties and interest, attorney fees and court costs for the years used to foreclose. Delinquent years that were not included in the judgment appear separately in the sales list as "Additional Taxes Due" — an item that regularly catches inexperienced bidders, because those years survive the sale and become the purchaser's problem.
Two consequences follow for owners. First, because the opening bid is tied to the judgment rather than to value, a house with substantial equity is very likely to draw competitive bidding and sell for well above the minimum. Second, that excess is not the county's to keep. Texas Tax Code Section 34.02 governs distribution of the proceeds, and Section 34.04 allows a former owner or other claimant to petition for excess proceeds, generally within two years of the sale. In Travis County those petitions are filed with the District Clerk, and the County Attorney's office handles tax collection litigation. Excess proceeds are real money that goes unclaimed with depressing regularity. If a sale has already happened on your property, this is the first thing to investigate.
It must be said clearly, though, that recovering excess proceeds is a poor substitute for selling. The equity that reaches a former owner through a Section 34.04 petition arrives after the judgment amount, the full penalty and interest stack, the attorney's fees and every court cost have been paid off the top, after a forced-sale bid rather than a market price, and after a wait measured in months. Almost any voluntary disposition produces more.
Texas is unusual in how generous its post-sale redemption right is, and the distinction that governs everything is whether the property was a residence homestead.
Under Texas Tax Code Section 34.21, the owner of property that was a residence homestead, was agricultural land, or was a mineral interest may redeem on or before the second anniversary of the date the purchaser's deed is filed for record. The redemption price is the bid amount, the deed recording fee, and the taxes, penalties, interest and costs the purchaser paid, plus a redemption premium of 25 percent of that aggregate if redemption occurs in the first year, or 50 percent if it occurs in the second.
All other property — a rental house, a vacant lot, a non-homestead inherited property — carries a redemption window of 180 days from the date the deed is filed for record, and the premium payable to a purchaser other than a taxing unit may not exceed 25 percent.
Three details decide real cases. The clock starts when the deed is recorded, not on the sale date, so the first task after a sale is to find the recording date in the county clerk's records. The premium is calculated on the aggregate total the purchaser has in the property, not on the original tax bill, so it grows as the purchaser pays subsequent taxes and permitted costs. And the redemption right belongs to the owner; it is not a transferable asset you can sell to a third party to exercise on your behalf. Anyone offering to buy your "redemption rights" is proposing something the statute does not contemplate.
Almost every owner we speak with in Austin believes they have two options: pay in full or lose the house. Texas law provides considerably more than that, and most of these are underused.
1. An installment agreement under Section 33.02. This is the most widely available and least known. The collector may enter into an installment agreement with any delinquent taxpayer, but on request the collector shall enter into one with an owner of a residence homestead who has a Section 11.13 exemption and who has not had an installment agreement with that taxing unit in the preceding 24 months. The agreement must be in writing, must be paid monthly, must run at least 12 months for a homestead, and may not exceed 36 months. Critically, Section 33.02(b-1) suspends the accrual of the Section 33.01(a) penalty during the agreement on an exempt homestead — interest continues, but the penalty stops. While the agreement is current, Section 33.02(d) bars the taxing unit from seizing the property or filing suit. Note two conditions: executing the agreement is an irrevocable admission of liability, and missing a payment reinstates the penalty retroactively as though the agreement never existed.
2. A tax deferral under Section 33.06. For an owner who is 65 or older, disabled as defined by Section 11.13(m), or qualified for the disabled veteran exemption under Section 11.22, this is the strongest protection in the code. Filing a deferral affidavit with the chief appraiser at the Travis Central Appraisal District stops any taxing unit from filing suit and prevents a tax sale of the homestead. Interest during the deferral runs at 5 percent annually instead of the Section 33.01 rate — a point a great many Texas tax articles still get wrong, quoting the older 8 percent figure. No new Section 33.01 penalty accrues during the deferral period. Two further provisions are worth knowing: to stop a sale that is already scheduled, the abatement affidavit under Section 33.06(c-1) must be delivered to the chief appraiser, the collector or its attorney, and the officer conducting the sale no later than the fifth day before the sale; and under Section 33.06(f) the deferral can survive the owner's death for a surviving spouse who was 55 or older when the owner died. The deferral is a postponement, not forgiveness — the lien remains and the whole balance comes due 181 days after the owner no longer owns and occupies the home.
3. Quarterly installments under Section 31.031. For homestead owners who are 65 or older, disabled, or qualifying disabled veterans, the current year's taxes can be paid in four installments rather than one, with no penalty or interest as long as each installment is timely. This is a preventive measure rather than a cure, but it stops next year's bill from repeating this year's problem.
4. A waiver request under Section 33.011. Penalties and interest can be waived in defined circumstances, chiefly where the taxing unit's or appraisal district's own act or omission caused the delinquency, or where a bill was mailed to the wrong address. Deadlines are short and the grounds are narrow, but if your notice genuinely went to a prior address after a transfer, it costs nothing to ask in writing.
5. A protest or correction of the underlying value. If the appraised value driving the bill is wrong, the bill is wrong. Section 25.25 corrections and Chapter 41 protest procedures operate on their own calendar, and the late homestead application under Section 11.431 discussed above can reduce a delinquent year retroactively.
6. A Section 32.06 property tax loan. A licensed transferee regulated under Finance Code Chapter 351 pays the taxing unit and takes a transfer of the tax lien. This is a real option and it is sometimes the right one, but it should be approached with clear eyes. The transferred lien retains the tax lien's priority, which means it sits ahead of the mortgage, and Section 32.065 permits contractual foreclosure on that lien. Section 32.06 requires the transferee to disclose every type and amount of additional charge or fee before taking an application fee or executing the contract, and it restricts post-closing fees to a defined list. Read those disclosures, compare the total cost against a Section 33.02 installment agreement, and be aware that most mortgage deeds of trust treat a tax lien transfer as an event of default.
A delinquent tax balance does not prevent a sale. This is the single most common misconception we encounter, and it costs Austin owners real money every year. A tax lien is a lien. It appears on the title commitment, a payoff figure is obtained from the Travis County Tax Office, and it is paid at closing out of the proceeds exactly the way a mortgage payoff is handled. The owner receives what remains.
What changes with time is not whether you can sell but how much is left when you do. Every month adds a point of interest. July 1 adds the collection penalty. A judgment adds attorney's fees and the Section 33.48 costs, including the title search and any ad litem fee. The sale itself replaces a negotiated price with a forced-sale bid and converts your equity into an excess proceeds claim that has to be petitioned for. The staircase only descends.
Two practical notes for the Austin market specifically. First, the conventional listing route works perfectly well for a tax-delinquent house that is in good condition and has time on the clock — the delinquency is a closing item, nothing more, and a market sale will almost always net more than any alternative. That is the honest recommendation whenever the calendar allows it. Second, the calendar frequently does not allow it, and condition is often the reason: deferred maintenance is strongly correlated with tax delinquency, because the same shortfall produces both. A house needing a roof, a foundation evaluation or a full systems replacement will sit, and lender-financed buyers will not close on it.
That is the situation a cash purchase is genuinely suited to: a defined closing date the owner can plan a tax payoff around, no financing contingency, no repair requirements, and no appraisal. It is not the highest-price option and we do not present it as one. Before deciding, price both paths honestly — the cash offer estimator gives a realistic range for the as-is route, the net proceeds comparator sets that against a traditional listing after commissions, concessions and carrying costs, and the mortgage payoff calculator tells you what a lender lien will absorb. If you are weighing institutional buyers, our comparison against Opendoor covers the fee structures. Our tax sale defense kit and foreclosure survival playbook collect the forms, deadlines and contacts in one place.
Whatever you decide, do these three things this week: get a written payoff quote from the Travis County Tax Office good through a specific date; ask in writing whether you qualify for a Section 33.02 installment agreement or a Section 33.06 deferral; and confirm your homestead exemption is on file, including a Section 11.431 late application if it is not. Those three steps are free, they preserve every option, and they are the ones most often skipped.
Travis County property taxes are due by January 31 and become delinquent February 1 under Texas Tax Code Section 31.02. If January 31 falls on a weekend or holiday, the delinquency date moves to the next business day. On February 1 a combined 7 percent penalty and interest charge attaches immediately to the unpaid balance.
The Travis County Tax Office publishes a fixed schedule: 7 percent total in February, rising each month to 18 percent in July. Penalty caps at 12 percent, but interest keeps accruing at 1 percent per month indefinitely, reaching 24 percent after a full year and climbing from there.
No. The Travis County Tax Office states plainly that it does not sell tax liens. Texas is a tax deed state: the county sells the property itself at a foreclosure sale and issues a Constable's Deed to the winning bidder. There is no certificate that turns an investor into the lienholder.
Under Texas Tax Code Section 34.21, a residence homestead, agricultural land, or mineral interest carries a two-year redemption period running from the date the purchaser's deed is recorded. All other property carries 180 days. Redemption requires repaying the bid plus costs and a statutory premium.
For homestead and agricultural property, the redemption premium is 25 percent of the total if you redeem in the first year and 50 percent if you redeem in the second. For non-homestead property inside the 180-day window, the premium payable to a private purchaser cannot exceed 25 percent.
Yes. Texas Tax Code Section 33.06 lets an owner who is 65 or older, disabled, or a qualifying disabled veteran file a deferral affidavit that halts suits and sales on their homestead. Interest drops to 5 percent annually during the deferral. An abatement affidavit must reach the officer at least five days before a scheduled sale.
Yes. A tax lien does not block a sale; it simply has to be paid at closing out of the proceeds, the way a mortgage payoff is handled. Selling before judgment is generally cheaper than selling afterward, because attorney fees, court costs and additional interest keep compounding onto the balance.
BuyHousesInCash buys houses across Travis, Williamson and Hays counties in as-is condition, including properties carrying delinquent tax balances, judgments or pending sale dates. We will tell you plainly when listing on the open market would serve you better — and when the calendar no longer allows it.
Start with your local market page for Texas or Austin, or read our pillar guides on stopping foreclosure and selling an inherited house. We also cover Georgetown and the surrounding metro.