CPA San AntonioThe levies a closed month has to carry

The red courthouse, and a ticket that is higher than the menu

The county courthouse is red sandstone, and people in the city walk past it without thinking of it as a tax form. We are Texans, and that building is a civic pride. We look at it and think about the returns that have to be true before anyone walks inside with a question. The returns start much smaller than the building. They start at a ticket.

Stand at a counter near that courthouse on a Friday. The guest ordered one plate. The ticket is higher than the menu. The difference never belonged to the shop. It was collected for the state and for the local pieces, and it has to sit apart from sales until the return on the 20th. A month that mixes the difference into revenue is not a closed month. It is a month that will surprise you on the due date.

The school district that covers downtown, midtown, and the inner city is the one those neighborhoods set their year by. We are Texans, and a school calendar is how a city feels the seasons. The district's own levy is a different bill from the extra on that Friday ticket. Both of them still have to come out of books that tie.

The extra on the ticket, piece by piece

On a sale inside the city limits the guest pays 8.25 percent all together. The state keeps 6.25 of those points. The city's own slice is 1.125 points, made of one full point of city tax plus 0.125 for Pre-K 4 SA, and that slice files under local code 2015012. Transit through VIA takes another half point, and the code on that half point is 3015995. Look up 3015664 when you need the Advanced Transportation District, currently 0.375 percent. State plus those local slices lands on the 8.25 cap, with nothing left above it.

Remembering only the combined 8.25 does not tell you which agency gets which slice. Each agency wants its own slice named, not one memorized total. The sale's address picks the code, and the code picks the lines on the form. Sales tax in this stack has no Bexar County piece in it. A job past the city limit is a different stack, and an emergency services district out there can add a local piece the city stack does not use.

At the start of 2026 the Advanced Transportation District piece became 0.375 percent, up from the 0.25 percent piece used before that. The combined cap stayed 8.25. What changed is which slice sits inside that cap. January's sales tax return is the first form that should show the new piece. When January has not been closed, nobody files until the month is real. Filing this sales tax return is separate from payday, and a payday provider does it only when that job was handed to them. This page is the sales tax return, prepared from a month that already split the liability from the sale.

The school levy and the bill on the building

School tax is not the sales tax cap, and adding them together is a mistake we see when an owner both sells from a building and owns it. The district that covers a large share of the city's blocks, about 37.7 percent of them in the Comptroller's school workbook, published a 2025 combined levy of 1.1552 on each 100 dollars of taxable value. Of the 1.1552, the piece that runs the schools is 0.7552 and the piece that pays the debt is 0.4. That bill is property tax. It is not the extra on the Friday ticket.

For fiscal year 2027 the city published a property tax rate of 56.288 cents on each 100 dollars, with 35.138 cents for maintenance and operations and 21.150 cents for debt. That bill is not the extra a guest pays on a plate. Own the building and sell from the counter, and both bills show up, on two forms, drawn from one set of books. Property tax and the extra on a plate stay in separate paragraphs, because adding those rates produces a number that means nothing.

Rendition for most owners lands in April, and a written request under Tax Code section 22.23 can push it to 15 May. Copy the asset list out of books that are already closed. An asset list built during the due week, from memory, is the mess this close is meant to prevent. The deadline calendar the Comptroller publishes is where those rendition days are printed. Fiesta has belonged to April here since 1891, which is why that month is a poor time to invent an asset list from memory.

What we do with these figures, and what we refuse to do

We use them to check a closed month and to prepare the returns that month supports. We do not quote them as your bill. Your address, your district, and your sales may land on a different line, especially near the city limit. A figure without a public page behind it does not stay on this site.

The May franchise page is a different form from all of these, and it has its own page on this site because the federal return waits for it. Margin rates and the no-tax-due threshold live there, not here, so this page can stay with the levies a receipt and a building actually meet.

Pages that go further.