What to watch: Midland City Council will meet on Wednesday, Aug. 12, to set the maximum property tax rate it can adopt for the 2026-27 budget. Council can ultimately adopt a lower rate in September, but it cannot go above the ceiling it sets Wednesday.

City staff is recommending the state-calculated “no-new-revenue” rate. Despite the name, that rate would be about 10% higher than the city’s current tax rate because the total taxable value of existing property in Midland fell by about $1.5 billion this year. To collect roughly the same amount of money from a smaller tax base, the city has to charge a higher rate.

The big picture: A “No-new-revenue” rate means the city collects roughly the same total amount from properties that were already on the tax roll last year. It does not mean your individual city tax bill stays the same. What that means for homeowners depends on what happened to their taxable property value:

If your taxable value stayed the same as last year, your city tax bill would increase about 10%. On a $300,000 taxable value, that’s roughly $105 more than last year.

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If your taxable value fell about 6%, roughly in line with the overall decline in Midland’s existing tax base, your bill would stay about the same.

If your taxable value fell more than the citywide average, your city tax bill would generally decrease.

Go deeper: New construction doesn’t count toward the no-new-revenue calculation. Midland added $659.5 million in new construction to the tax roll this year. That means the city could adopt the no-new-revenue rate and still collect approximately $1.75 million more in property taxes than last year because there are new properties to tax.

What’s next: The first vote on the proposed rate is Tuesday, Sept. 8, followed by a second vote on Tuesday, Sept. 15. The adopted rate will fund the 2026-27 budget, which takes effect Oct. 1.