Texas has two first-time buyer issuers, not one

Almost everything written for a first-time buyer in this state says "the state program", singular. There are two of them, they are run by different bodies, and one of those bodies is not a state body at all. The department named above is a state agency. Alongside it sits a self-sustaining nonprofit the legislature created, which issues its own statewide products under its own rules and is not the same organisation. Treating the pair as one programme is where most of the confusion on this subject starts, and the eligibility test recited above is the first place the two come apart.

The same three years, counted two ways

Both issuers look back the same distance. They do not look at the same thing. The department asks whether you have owned and occupied a principal home in that window, which is two conditions joined by an "and". The nonprofit asks whether you have owned, or held an ownership interest in, a home at all. Somebody who bought a house, never lived in it and let it out is a first-time buyer under one wording and is not under the other.

The nonprofit then adds a rule that catches people who have never owned anything. It counts a married couple as one, so both spouses hold an ownership interest even where only one of them signed the deed of trust. A spouse's earlier house therefore disqualifies a buyer whose own name has never been on a title. If you are marrying into a first purchase, that is the sentence to read twice.

The larger asymmetry is that the nonprofit's down payment assistance does not require first-time status at all. Only its tax credit certificate does. So the question that gates one issuer's entire product line is not a gate on the other's, and a buyer who has been told they are ineligible has usually been told it about only one of the two.

What the department asks for that the other issuer does not

Three requirements sit on the department's side alone. A first-time buyer using its flagship purchase product has to reside in this state, evidenced after closing by a sworn affidavit, and the address on that affidavit is not required to match the one on the loan application. Status is then checked against three years of federal returns or transcripts showing no deduction taken for mortgage interest or real property taxes on a principal home, which means a buyer with thin or missing filings is being asked to prove a negative.

Against that, the same department waives the requirement outright in two situations. An honourably discharged veteran who has not used the exception before does not have to meet it, and neither does anybody buying inside a qualified targeted census tract. The second of those is a map question rather than a question about you, and it is the one most often left unchecked, because nothing about a listing tells you which tract it sits in.

The two credit certificates are in opposite conditions

A mortgage credit certificate turns part of the interest you pay into a federal tax credit each year, and both issuers have run one. They are not in the same state today, and that is the single most useful thing on this page.

The department still issues a certificate on its own, without one of its mortgages underneath it, and says its supply is limited. It comes with conditions: a stand-alone certificate cannot sit on a first lien carrying outside down payment help or another subsidised loan or grant, and temporary buydowns are not permitted with it at all. The nonprofit has discontinued its stand-alone certificate indefinitely and says so on its buyer page and again on its lender page. From that issuer a certificate now exists only bundled with its own assistance, while funds last. Asking the wrong one of the two for a stand-alone certificate costs a phone call and, if the answer is taken as final, a benefit that was available from the other.

Why no assistance percentage appears on this page

Both issuers quote their help as a share of the loan rather than as an amount, and neither publishes a dollar ceiling anywhere, so a dollar figure shown to you was worked out from a sample loan by whoever showed it. The shares themselves are left out too, and for a sharper reason than caution. The nonprofit's tiers live in a rate table that moved twice inside five weeks over one summer: an option that was unpriced in one capture was live in the next, and the grant tiers published beside it changed at the same time. A tier list copied into prose has a short and unpredictable shelf life, and neither reading of that table is recorded as the answer here.

One structure cannot be described at all. The nonprofit's lender-facing table carries a bond-funded second lien on the government-insured products that never appears in the consumer description of what it offers, and the nonprofit publishes no statement of that option's status anywhere a reader or a machine can retrieve. Whether it is open can be inferred only from whether its cells carry prices on the day somebody looks, and they have not stayed the same. So this page will not tell you whether that option is available, and neither will the nonprofit's website. A participating lender, asked on the day, is the only source there is.

The exemption your seller may have already used this year

$140,000 (Texas Legislative Council, Texas Constitution, article VIII, section 1-b(c), and Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, read 25 August 2026) is what the school-district residence homestead exemption takes off a home's value. Voters raised it at a recent amendment election, which is why a good deal of what you will read on the subject still prints the older figure.

Whether you see any of it in your purchase year turns on the seller rather than on you. A buyer who acquires a home after the first of January can take the exemption for the rest of that year as soon as they qualify, but only where the previous owner did not already hold the same exemption for that year. Buy from an owner-occupant and there is nothing left to claim until the next year comes round. Buy from a builder, an investor or an estate and it starts straight away for the remaining part of the year. So two buyers closing on the same day, on comparable homes, can inherit quite different first-year bills, and what separates them is a fact about the person on the other side of the table rather than anything about the property.

The cap on how fast a homestead's appraised value may climb behaves the same way. It runs from the first of January of the year after you first qualify, not from the day you close, so the first year is the uncapped one. Every property here is re-appraised annually and a purchase resets nothing, which is the opposite of the assumption a buyer brings from a state where the sale is the trigger.

The "none" above answers a narrower question than it looks

What the recited section was asked is whether this state levies four particular taxes on a transfer. It does not, and on one of the four the constitution bars the legislature from ever creating it. That is the whole of the question and the whole of the answer. A first-time buyer reading it has been told nothing at all about the money that leaves their account on completion day, and the two get run together so routinely that they are worth separating before the next paragraph names the one charge here that can be sourced.

The county charge to record the deed is real, and unlike almost everything else on this page it is not set at state level. A small statutory base sits under it, and on top of that each county's commissioners choose whether to adopt two optional fees, which is exactly why neighbouring counties land on different totals. In the largest county the first page of a deed costs $25 (Harris County Clerk, Real Property fee schedule, read 25 August 2026), with each further page and each extra indexed name charged on top. At least one large metropolitan county publishes a lower first page than the rest, and that is its schedule rather than a misprint, so a figure quoted for one county is not a figure for the state.

The county line moves the tax bill, not the loan ceiling

Buyers coming from a coastal market expect the federal conforming limit to climb where housing is dear, and ask which counties here are treated as expensive. The answer is short. None. All 254 Texas counties sit at the 2026 national baseline one-unit limit of $832,750; not one is designated high cost. (Federal Housing Finance Agency, Conforming Loan Limit Values for Calendar Year 2026, All Counties, read 25 August 2026)

What does move across a county line is the tax bill. Statewide, the levy actually charged across all taxable property works out at 1.858% (Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Tax Rates and Levies (Tax Code Section 5.091), read 25 August 2026) of taxable value, and that denominator is the point: it is value after exemptions, not the market figure an appraisal district starts from. For an owner holding no exemption it is close to the whole of what the house is worth. Municipal utility districts are charged on top of that average and are not inside it, so an estimate built from a statewide figure understates a house sitting in one and says so nowhere. The other thing that moves by county is the issuers' own income and price ceilings, which is where a buyer's geography question actually belongs.