Trophy Club Redrew Its Tax Map in 2025. Most Buyers Are Still Reading the Old One.
On October 1, 2025, homeowners inside the Highlands at Trophy Club stopped paying a flat, per-lot charge for fire protection and started paying one that moves with their home's appraised value instead. The Trophy Club Municipal Utility District expanded its boundaries to cover the entire town, including the Highlands Public Improvement District, and folded what used to be a flat Emergency Services Assessment on the water bill into the property tax bill. Nobody's monthly water statement announced this. It arrived as a line-item change on a document most people open once a year.
That single shift is one piece of a larger pattern worth understanding before comparing two Trophy Club addresses side by side. The number on a listing sheet, and even the median price already seen on a portal, says almost nothing about what two houses in this town actually cost to hold. Trophy Club sits across a county line and a patchwork of special districts that don't show up in a search filter, and the gap between two otherwise identical homes can run into real money.
Before the expansion, residents inside the Highlands PID paid for fire service two different ways depending on where they lived. Homes outside the PID, already inside the Municipal Utility District's original footprint, paid a property tax for fire funding. Homes inside the PID paid a flat Emergency Services Assessment tacked onto the monthly water and sewer bill, plus a separate PID surcharge for infrastructure debt.
The Town's own FAQ on the boundary expansion lays out the mechanical change plainly: the flat surcharge and stand-alone assessment are gone, and PID residents now pay their equivalent share for fire service through the same property tax roll as everyone else in the District. The stated goal is a simplified, uniform way of billing for a service every resident already used. What that description leaves out is what "equivalent" means once a fixed dollar figure gets swapped for a rate applied to assessed value.
| Fire service charge | Before Oct. 1, 2025 | After Oct. 1, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| How it was billed | Flat Emergency Services Assessment on the water bill | Property tax through TC MUD No. 1 |
| Who set the amount | Same dollar figure for every PID lot | Scales with each home's assessed value |
| Where you'd see it | Monthly water/sewer statement | Annual county tax bill |
A homeowner whose lot was valued below the PID average likely pays a bit less under the new system. A homeowner whose lot sits above that average likely pays more. The Town's own materials describe the swap this way: moving from a flat charge to a value-based tax means small changes are likely, and the direction of that change depends entirely on where a specific home sits relative to its neighbors, not on anything a buyer would see by touring the house.
The fire assessment folded into the MUD tax is only part of what a Highlands buyer signs up for. The Highlands PID still levies its own annual per-lot assessment for infrastructure, unrelated to fire service, and that one stays flat. Reported figures put it somewhere between roughly $1,037 and $2,357 a year depending on lot size. That charge sits on top of, not instead of, the new MUD tax line.
Layer both together and a Highlands home carries the MUD's district-wide rate of $0.06814 per $100 of assessed value, which funds water, wastewater, and fire service townwide, plus a separate flat PID infrastructure assessment that can vary by more than $1,300 depending on which lot is in question. Neither number moves with the sale price of the house next door. Both move with decisions made by district and PID boards that have nothing to do with a listing agent's comps.
The Highlands isn't the only place in Trophy Club where two houses that look interchangeable carry different math. The town itself straddles the Denton and Tarrant county line, with the boundary running roughly along State Highway 114.
A side-by-side breakdown of the two combined rates puts the Denton County portion at about $1.62 per $100 of assessed value, split across Northwest ISD, the Town of Trophy Club, Denton County, and North Central Texas College. The Tarrant County portion comes in a bit higher, around $1.69 per $100. On a $940,000 home, the difference between those two combined rates alone is a few hundred dollars a year before adding any MUD or PID charges. Not dramatic, but real, and entirely a function of which side of an invisible line a parcel falls on.
Broader tax-estimate tools built off entire zip codes tell a very different story. Some report Denton County effective rates running higher than Tarrant County by a wide margin, in the opposite direction from the Trophy Club-specific breakdown above. That gap almost certainly comes from mixing in every other city and price point inside each county's zip code, not from anything specific to a Trophy Club parcel. It's a reminder that a county-wide average is not a substitute for pulling the actual appraisal record on the address in question.
The Highlands posted a three-month median sale price of $940,000 as of March 2026, up 7.4% from the same period a year earlier. Running that number through the rates above, purely as an illustration and not a tax bill, shows roughly where it lands before any homestead exemption.
On the Denton County side: about $15,240 in combined county, city, school, and college tax, plus roughly $640 for the MUD's district-wide rate, plus the separate Highlands PID assessment of $1,037 to $2,357. Total before exemptions lands somewhere between $16,900 and $18,200.
On the Tarrant County side: about $15,886 in combined tax, the same $640 MUD charge, and the same PID range. Total before exemptions lands between roughly $17,560 and $18,880.
Two homes, same asking price, same PID, same MUD rate. The gap between them comes down to which county line they sit on and where their lot falls in the PID's assessment schedule. A homestead exemption changes the exact figures for an owner-occupant, but it doesn't change which side of the county line or which lot tier a given parcel occupies.
None of this touches every address in town. Established sections built around the original golf course community in the 1970s through 1990s generally sit outside the Highlands PID boundary altogether, which means no separate infrastructure assessment layered on top of ordinary property tax. The stack described above is specific to PID-designated neighborhoods like the Highlands, not a townwide feature of living in Trophy Club.
That distinction carries more weight than the county line for most buyers. A home in an older, established section and a home in the Highlands can carry very different total tax pictures even at the same price point, for reasons that have nothing to do with lot size and everything to do with which special district happens to cover that specific plat.
The practical version of all this is short. Before treating two Trophy Club homes as interchangeable because they're priced the same, pull the parcel record for each one from the county appraisal district that applies, Denton or Tarrant. That record shows the exact taxing units attached to that address: which county, whether it falls inside the MUD, and whether a PID assessment applies. It takes a few minutes, and it answers a question that a listing sheet, and even the median price already seen, cannot.
Does every home in Trophy Club sit inside a MUD or PID? No. The Trophy Club Municipal Utility District's boundary now covers the whole town following the October 2025 expansion, but the separate, flat PID infrastructure assessment applies only to specific PID-designated neighborhoods like the Highlands. Older, established sections generally don't carry that additional charge.
Which county costs more to own in, Denton or Tarrant? Within Trophy Club specifically, a side-by-side rate comparison shows the Tarrant County portion running a bit higher than the Denton County portion, by a few hundred dollars a year on a home in the high six figures. Broader county-wide tax calculators sometimes show a much larger gap in the opposite direction, which reflects the mix of an entire county rather than Trophy Club addresses specifically.
How do I find out which side of the line a specific listing falls on? Search the address through the appropriate county appraisal district. The parcel record will list every taxing unit attached to that home, including the MUD and any PID assessment.
If you're comparing two Trophy Club addresses and want the actual tax stack pulled for each one before writing an offer, Trisha Atwood can walk through the parcel records with you side by side. Let's Connect.
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