Moving from Chicago to Fort Worth's west side: the property-tax twins

Here's the series' strangest fact: Cook County and this corridor tax houses at nearly the same effective rates. The Chicago→Texas case is built on the income-tax line, the trajectory, and February.

The math: one line moves, one line doesn't

Illinois taxes all income at a flat 4.95% — about $4,150 a year on $100,000, roughly $7,400 on a $150,000 household — and that line goes to zero in Texas. The property-tax line, unusually, barely moves: Illinois carries the nation's second-highest effective property-tax rate (~2.1%), with Cook County effective rates commonly 1.9–2.2% and suburbs like Oak Park and Evanston reaching 2.5–3.5% — against this corridor's 1.9–2.35% published rates, softened by the $140,000 school-portion homestead exemption computed below. Chicago's 10.25% sales tax also beats the corridor's 8.25% by two full points. Net for a $150K household in a $400K house: the move keeps roughly $7,000–$9,000 a year, essentially all of it from the income-tax and sales-tax lines, with home prices between the two markets closer than any other pairing in this series.

The trajectory question

The harder-to-quantify half of the Chicago case is direction of travel. Illinois's property-tax level is structurally tied to pension funding gaps and 6,900-plus overlapping taxing districts, and a 2020 referendum to enable graduated income-tax rates failed but recurs in every budget debate. Texas moved the opposite way in the same window — the homestead exemption rose to $140,000 by statewide vote in November 2025, and the appraisal cap holds assessed growth to 10%. Neither trend is guaranteed; both are real. What Chicago households should verify before assuming savings: this corridor's home insurance (hail belt, top-five nationally) will likely exceed a Chicago premium — the verification checklist covers the quote-first sequence.

What you give up

A great American city: the lakefront, the food depth, transit that makes one-car (or no-car) life possible, and neighborhoods with a century of texture. This corridor is car-first, new, and suburban by design — Fort Worth's cultural district and stockyards are the 25-minute counterweight, not a replacement. What you get: winters without February, a school-district-anchored family market, and a new-construction pipeline that Chicagoland's land economics can't match. Start with the which-side guide, then the hub sequence.

The Texas side of the ledger, computed honestly

Texas has no state income tax — and funds itself instead through property tax, which on this corridor runs from 1.902% of assessed value in Weatherford (Weatherford ISD) to 2.353% in the Fort Worth-in-Parker-County slice of Aledo ISD, with Willow Park at 2.091% and the city of Aledo at 2.056% (2024–2025 published rates; the full stack is on the corridor tax table). On a $425,000 house in Willow Park, the sticker math is about $8,890 a year — but Texas's homestead exemption now removes $140,000 of value from the school portion (raised by the November 2025 constitutional amendment), which cuts roughly $1,690 off that bill, landing near $7,200 a year before any additional city or county homestead percentages. The homestead cap then limits assessed-value growth to 10% a year while you live there. Two more honest lines: Texas home insurance is also among the country's most expensive (the corridor's hail belt is why), and sales tax here is 8.25%. The property-tax filing sequence that makes all of this real is in the buyer's property-tax playbook.

Where this goes next

Start with the which-side directional guide if Fort Worth itself is still an open question, then the relocation hub for the full 60/30/move-week sequence. Renting first? The match quiz sorts the corridor's pockets in two minutes and this month's specials show where the leverage is. Buying? The rent-vs-buy math runs on our observed rent data, the property-tax playbook covers the exemption filings that make the rates above real, and the new-construction guide tracks the Builder Incentive Index monthly. Other origin cities: California · Washington · Colorado · Florida · Hawaii · New York · international moves.

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