On September 15, 2026, the Buda City Council voted to set the city's property tax rate at $0.3895 per $100 of taxable value for fiscal year 2027, up from $0.3576 the year before. If you're watching Buda listings and that number just crossed your feed, here's the part that matters more for your actual offer: the city rate is the smallest, most stable line on a Buda tax bill. For an individual Buda address, a Municipal Utility District can add a separate tax rate. Buda has several such districts, each with its own board, bond schedule, and rate.
Buda's city tax rate has climbed three years running. It sat at $0.3395 per $100 in fiscal year 2025, rose to $0.3576 for fiscal year 2026, and now stands at $0.3895 for fiscal year 2027. Ahead of last year's adoption, City Manager Micah Grau said: "Rising service costs required us to make careful choices." The city has also pointed to $89.9 million in voter-approved 2021 bonds for transportation and park work as a factor pushing the debt-service portion of the rate higher even as home values have softened.
Here's what that history actually costs a homeowner. Between fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026, the average Buda household saw its city tax bill move from about $1,457 to about $1,471, a swing of roughly $14, because a drop in average home value largely offset the higher rate. For fiscal 2027, city reporting put the year-over-year change at closer to $96, from about $1,378 to about $1,474 on a median taxable value near $383,550. Even at the high end, you're talking about a difference measured in tens of dollars a month, spread across an entire city.
That's worth knowing. It is not worth basing a housing decision on.
Buda's median effective property tax rate, blending city, county, and school levies, runs in the neighborhood of 1.6 to 1.9 percent depending on which county slice of Buda a home sits in, since the city straddles both Hays and Travis county lines. That's the number most cost calculators will hand you if you type in a Buda address.
A home inside one of Buda's Municipal Utility Districts may also have a separate district tax rate. Sunfield, the roughly 2,700-acre master-planned community off I-35 that has become one of Buda's largest sources of new construction, is served by two separate districts, according to District Directory's listing for Sunfield Municipal Utility District No. 1 and District Directory's listing for Sunfield Municipal Utility District No. 3. The water, sewer, and drainage infrastructure had to go in before any of those homes could be built. Neither district's tax shows up in the city's rate. Both stack on top of it.
The result is a combined effective rate across Hays County, the City of Buda, Hays CISD, and Sunfield's district taxes that has run above 2.6 percent every year since 2021, and sat at roughly 2.73 percent for the 2025 tax year. Compare that to the roughly 1.62 percent blended median for Buda as a whole, and the gap is over a full percentage point. On a $400,000 assessed value, that's the difference between a tax bill in the $6,500 range and one closer to $10,900, a difference of roughly $4,400 a year between the two tax bills.
| Year | Buda City Tax Rate (per $100) | Sunfield Combined Effective Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | not applicable (pre-dates this rate series) | 2.9262% |
| 2022 | not applicable | 2.8085% |
| 2023 | not applicable | 2.6106% |
| 2024 | not applicable | 2.6737% |
| 2025 (FY26 city rate) | 0.3576 | 2.7269% |
| 2026 (FY27 city rate) | 0.3895 | not yet published |
The city rate is a single line that moves a few hundredths of a point a year. Sunfield's combined rate is a stack of five or six taxing entities that moves for entirely different reasons, and that's the number that decides what a specific address actually costs to hold.
The standard advice about MUDs is that the rate declines over time as a district pays down its original bonds and adds more rooftops to spread the debt across. That's true for a single-phase district that finishes construction and stops issuing new debt. It is not automatically true for a multi-phase, still-growing community.
Sunfield's own effective rate history makes the point. It ran 2.9262 percent in 2021, dropped to 2.6106 percent by 2023 as early bonds amortized, then climbed back to 2.7269 percent by 2025. A district that's still building out new sections keeps authorizing new bonds for the infrastructure those new sections need, which can push the rate back up even while the original debt is being retired in older phases. A buyer who assumes "it'll come down eventually" is making a bet on a development timeline they haven't seen, not a mathematical certainty.
The list price and the county's median rate may not show the full tax cost for a specific Buda address. Before you write an offer, or before you counsel a client who's about to:
Review the tax certificate for the applicable taxing entities and rates before you're under contract.
Will my MUD rate go down over time? Often, but not automatically. Rates tend to fall as a district retires debt and its tax base grows. In a community still adding phases, like Sunfield, new bonds for new sections can offset that decline, which is exactly what its rate history shows.
Is every new Buda neighborhood inside a MUD? No. Older, in-city sections of Buda may fall entirely under city, county, and school taxation with no separate district at all. Newer master-planned development, where a builder had to fund water and sewer infrastructure before the city extended service, is far more likely to carry one.
The city's new rate will show up in next year's Truth in Taxation notice and it's a legitimate thing to track. But if you're comparing two Buda addresses this fall, compare the city rate with any applicable district rate on each property's tax certificate.
If you're weighing two Buda neighborhoods and want the real number behind the list price, not just the county average, Courtney Unangst can pull the actual tax stack for any address you're considering before you write an offer.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
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