Dallas–Fort Worth is the base people name when they say a domicile is cheap. It is cheaper than most. But the metroplex is two airports forty miles apart, and inside one county here the tax on the same $400,000 house swings about $7,000 a year before exemptions — Cresson to Keene, both in Johnson County, a short drive apart.
Sits between the two cities, which is the whole reason it works. American’s largest hub. Reachable from Tarrant, Denton and north Dallas county on a tolerable drive; the mid-cities are the obvious answer and priced accordingly.
Southwest’s home, inside the Dallas city limits and seven miles from downtown. A Love Field base pulls you east into Dallas, Collin and Rockwall counties — a different housing market, different school districts and different tax rates from the ones priced below. None of the arithmetic on this page transfers to it, which is why Southwest at Love is worked separately rather than treated as a footnote to this one.
Treating the metroplex as one place is the first mistake. Which field you report to decides which half of it you can live in, and the two halves do not cost the same. Everything below is American at DFW International — the one metro worked all the way through for nothing. Southwest at Love is the same eleven sections run against the other half of the metroplex.
Combined rates stack county, city, school district and any municipal utility district on top of one another. In Johnson County alone, Keene sits at 2.58 per cent and Cresson at 0.82. On a $400,000 house that is a difference of about $7,000 every year, for two towns you could drive between over lunch.
Each bar spans the lowest and highest combined city rate observed in that county, outliers included, against a common scale of 0.8 to 2.6 per cent. Johnson runs nearly the full width of the chart because Cresson and Keene both sit inside it. The dollar column is the midpoint, which is not what any single address pays.
These are combined rates before exemptions: county, city, school district and any municipal utility district, stacked. Tarrant runs 2.10 to 2.40 per cent, and the calculator below uses 2.25 — the middle of the county you are most likely to buy in on a DFW assignment, on the same basis as this chart. A homestead exemption takes some of it back, mostly out of the school-district portion, so read these as the ceiling you shop against.
Every base comparison quietly assumes you will move to the base. Plenty of pilots never do. Keeping the house you have and jumpseating in has a real price — a crash pad, and a day on each end of every trip — and whether that price beats moving is arithmetic, not temperament. Put your own numbers in.
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Dallas–Fort Worth is the metro worked all the way through for nothing. Every carrier’s domiciles are built out on these same eleven sections and the same national scale, so a comparison between any two of them means something.