Money · Property Taxes
Should you protest your Plano property taxes?
We pulled every residential protest filed in Plano in 2025 and worked out what actually happened to them — how many got a reduction, how much, and whether the people who filed it themselves did worse than the ones who paid a firm.
Residential protests filed
21,639
Plano, 2025
Ended with a lower value
66.3%
14,341 of them
Median reduction
$9,093
≈ $195 off the first year's bill
Filed, then never showed up
7.7%
1,677 dismissed by default
Does hiring a firm actually beat doing it yourself?
Protest firms typically take 25–40% of your first year's tax saving. Here is what each route produced in Plano in 2025.
Filed it themselves
- Protests filed
- 3,256
- Got a reduction
- 71.0%
- Median reduction
- $15,022
- ≈ first-year tax saving
- $323
Hired an agent
- Protests filed
- 18,383
- Got a reduction
- 65.4%
- Median reduction
- $8,281
- ≈ first-year tax saving
- $178
Tax saving estimated at a 2.15% combined rate, before any firm's share. Compare the two medians, then subtract 25–40% from the agent column to see what you would actually keep.
Do you have to stand up and argue?
This is the part that stops most people filing. It shouldn't — here is how Plano protests actually ended in 2025.
- decided at an ARB hearing13,321 (62%)
- settled before a hearing5,384 (25%)
- dismissed — did not appear1,677 (8%)
- withdrawn or other1,257 (6%)
Median reduction when it settled before a hearing: $10,083. When it went all the way to an ARB hearing: $8,306.
Go deeper
The calendar
Miss one of these and you wait a year.
Jan 1
Valuation date
Your home is valued as it stood on this day.
Jan 31
Homestead exemption
File it if you haven't. Free, permanent, the biggest single lever.
Mid-April
Notices arrive
Your number shows up. Read it before you react.
May 15
Protest deadline
Or 30 days after your notice, whichever is later. Hard stop.
May–July
Informal, then ARB
Most reductions happen before a hearing.
Get the evidence request letter
Once you file, the district has to hand over the evidence it plans to use against you — including its own comparables. Most people never ask. We'll send you the one-page request, plus a reminder when next year's notices go out.
Send me the letterWhere these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is computed from 2025 protest records published by the appraisal district — Collin CAD Protest Data, Texas Open Data Portal (xmrt-bxjr). One row per protest. Last generated 2026-09-20.
We publish medians, not averages. Dollar reductions are heavily skewed by a handful of very expensive homes, so an average would overstate what a typical family gets. The median is the middle result — half did better, half did worse.
A "reduction" means the final appraised value came in below the value on the April notice. We report neighborhoods only where at least 50 protests were filed — below that, a median is noise.
Not tax or legal advice. Your result depends on your property. We are not paid by any protest firm.