Your county appraisal and the mineral tax bill, explained
Published September 23, 2026.
The first letter many new mineral owners receive is not a royalty check. It is a notice of appraised value from a county appraisal district, for an account they did not know existed, followed some months later by a tax bill. Both are ordinary, and both are easier to read once you know what the county is actually valuing.
Minerals are taxed as property in Texas
Texas has no state property tax. Property is taxed locally, by counties, school districts, cities, hospital districts and other taxing units, and the tax is ad valorem, which means it is charged on value.
A producing mineral interest is real property in Texas, so it is taxed like land. Each year the county appraisal district appraises the producing mineral interests in its county and sets up one account per owner per interest. That is why a single family can receive appraisal notices from four counties with four unrelated account numbers, none of which refers to any of the others.
A mineral interest that is not producing is a different case. Districts generally do not carry non-producing interests on the roll, because there is no production to value, so a family can own minerals for two generations and never see a notice until a well is drilled. The first appraisal notice is often how somebody learns they own anything at all.
How the value is set
The county is not valuing your minerals the way a buyer would. It is estimating the present value of the future income from an interest that will run out.
Most appraisal districts contract this work to a firm that specializes in it, and the method is broadly the same everywhere. The firm estimates how much oil or gas the lease will still produce, projects that production forward along a decline curve, applies prices and operating costs in the way the Texas Property Tax Code and the Comptroller’s appraisal guidance require, and discounts the resulting future income back to a present value. It then splits that value among the owners of the lease according to each one’s decimal interest.
Three consequences follow, and each one accounts for a phone call appraisal districts get every spring.
A new well’s value is usually highest in its first appraisal year and falls afterwards, because a shale well’s steepest decline is in its first two years. A value can move a long way from one year to the next without anything happening on the ground, because prices moved. And the appraised value is not what anybody would pay you for the interest, and is not a valuation you could take to a bank.
Reading the notice
A notice of appraised value carries the same handful of things whatever county mailed it.
- The owner name and account number, which is that district’s own number and no one else’s.
- The property, described by lease name, lease number, operator and interest type.
- The appraised value for this year, and usually last year’s beside it.
- The roll year, and whether the value comes off a certified roll or is still preliminary and able to move.
- The taxing units that will levy against it, with estimated taxes.
- The protest deadline and how to file.
The single most useful thing on the notice is the lease name and operator, because that is what connects a tax account to a well, a check stub and the Railroad Commission’s records. Notices are normally mailed in the spring, and values are certified to the taxing units in the summer.
Protesting a value
Every Texas property owner can protest an appraised value, and minerals are no exception.
The deadline is printed on the notice, and that printed date is the authority for your account. For most property Texas sets it at May 15 or 30 days after the notice was delivered, whichever is later. A protest filed late is generally not heard, which is why the date matters more than the argument.
The process usually runs in two stages. Most districts offer an informal conference with an appraiser first, where a value is often adjusted without a hearing if the owner has something the district did not: a decimal that is wrong, a well that has been plugged, an interest that was sold. If that does not settle it, the appraisal review board, a panel of local residents rather than district employees, hears the protest and decides. Beyond the review board, Texas provides further routes including district court and binding arbitration, each with its own deadline and cost.
This guide does not take a view on whether to protest, and nobody can tell you from the outside whether your value is wrong. What is worth knowing is what a successful mineral protest usually turns on: a factual error about the interest, the decimal or the well’s status, rather than a disagreement about oil prices.
Paying the bill and what happens if you do not
The appraisal district sets values; it does not send bills. The county tax assessor-collector does that, generally in October, once each taxing unit has adopted its rate.
Texas property taxes are generally due by January 31 and become delinquent on February 1, when penalty and interest begin to run. A tax lien attaches to the property on January 1 each year to secure the tax, and it stays until the tax is paid.
An unpaid mineral account is not a small matter simply because the sum is small. A lien on a mineral interest clouds its title, penalties and interest accumulate, and a taxing unit can ultimately sue and have the interest sold. The tax office is also the place to ask about installment arrangements and about any exemption or deferral that may apply, since those are set by statute and administered locally.
If a bill arrives for an interest you do not believe you own, or for one you sold, the appraisal district is the office that corrects ownership, and it will want the deed or the division order that shows the change.
What to do next
Keep every notice and every bill with the lease and the division orders, because together they are a complete picture of one interest. Check the decimal on the notice against the decimal on your division order, since a difference between them is the single most common correctable error. Put the protest deadline in a calendar the day the notice arrives, whether or not you expect to use it.
Take the income-tax side, including depletion and how royalty income is reported, to a CPA rather than to the appraisal district, which deals only in value. Take a genuine ownership dispute to a Texas oil and gas attorney.
NetAcre finds your minerals on the county roll and shows you your appraised values across counties in one place, free.