Belton, Texas Real Estate: The Facts, Sourced

The short version: Belton is the Bell County seat on I-35 between Austin and Waco, with a median sale price of $322,442 (Homes.com, trailing 12 months, crawled August 2026), one school district — Belton ISD, TEA-rated B (80) in 2025 — and a combined property-tax rate of $2.0046 per $100 of value (tax-year 2025) for a home inside city limits. Two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lakes border it, and the region’s largest employer, Fort Hood, sits about 20 miles west. Every figure below names its source. For the narrative version, see our guide to living in Belton.

Key facts

Measure	Figure
Median sale price	$322,442
Average price per square foot	$185
Sales, trailing 12 months	1,036
Population	23,054 (2020 Census); 25,964 estimated (2025)
School district	Belton ISD — TEA overall B (80), 2025
Combined tax rate, in-city Belton ISD home	$2.0046 per $100 (tax year 2025)
Lakes	Belton Lake 12,385 acres; Stillhouse Hollow Lake 6,430 acres (both USACE)
Nearest Army post	Fort Hood, ~20 miles west

Market figures: Homes.com, Belton TX city page, trailing 12 months, crawled August 2026. Population: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts (2020 Census and Vintage 2025 estimate).

Market

Measure	Figure	Source
Median sale price	$322,442 (down 4% year over year)	Homes.com, trailing 12 months (crawled Aug 2026)
Median single-family sale price	$323,000	Homes.com
Median townhouse sale price	$250,000	Homes.com
Average price per square foot	$185	Homes.com
Sales volume	1,036 sales in prior 12 months	Homes.com
Average days on market	88 (Homes.com cites a 56-day national average)	Homes.com
Months of supply	3.90	Homes.com
Median list price	$332,597	Homes.com
Homes for sale at crawl	340	Homes.com
Median value, owner-occupied homes	$258,700 (2020–2024)	U.S. Census Bureau, ACS via QuickFacts
Median sale price (second source)	$334,900, with 107 average days on market (April 2026)	Local market report (Amanda Brown)

One variance note: the local April 2026 report’s $334,900 median and 107 days on market come from a different source and methodology than the Homes.com series above. Both are published here with their sources; they should not be averaged or mixed. The Census figure ($258,700) measures all owner-occupied homes, not homes that sold, so it is not comparable to the sale-price medians.

Schools — Belton ISD

Measure	Figure	Source / note
District	Belton Independent School District	HQ 400 N. Wall St., Belton
Schools	20	3 high schools, 4 middle schools, 9+ elementary schools, 1 early childhood school
Enrollment	13,697 students	NCES / Texas Dept. of Education data via Public School Review; the district demographer’s fall 2025 projection was 13,560
Coverage	198.6 square miles	Includes Belton, Morgan’s Point Resort and part of Temple
Student–teacher ratio	14:1	Public School Review (NCES/TEA)
Graduation rate	92%	Public School Review (NCES/TEA)
TEA accountability, 2025	Overall B (80)	District’s report of TEA’s 2025 release (Aug 18, 2025); first B under the current system since 2021–22; CCMR rate 94%
TEA financial accountability (FIRST), 2024–25	98 — “A” / Superior Achievement	Financial-management rating, based on audited 2023–24 data; a different measure from the academic rating
Belton High School (Tigers)	1,762 students	TEA campus data
Lake Belton High School (Broncos)	Close to 2,300 students	Opened fall 2020; located at 9809 FM 2483 in Temple; campus page claims a campus-level “A”

Rating conflict, stated plainly: a realty site’s comparison table lists Belton ISD’s TEA rating as “A.” That conflicts with the district’s own report of TEA’s 2025 release, B (80). The A appears to be a campus figure — Lake Belton High’s own page claims a campus A. The district rating published here is the B (80).

Property taxes — Belton ISD home inside Belton city limits

Texas publishes rates as dollars per $100 of taxable value. A Belton ISD home inside Belton city limits is taxed by these entities:

Entity	Tax year 2025 rate	Adopted 2026 rate
Belton ISD	$1.1494 (M&O $0.7869 + debt $0.3625)	$1.1177
City of Belton	$0.5225	$0.5619
Bell County	$0.3128	$0.2995
Bell County Road district	$0.0199	$0.0468
Combined (before Clearwater UWCD)	$2.0046 per $100	$2.0259 per $100
Clearwater Underground Water Conservation District	$0.00223	$0.002216

Sources: Belton ISD Financial Transparency page and board resolution (adopted August 18, 2025); City of Belton truth-in-taxation notice; Bell County Appraisal District 2025 tax statements; adopted 2026 rates per Bell County truth-in-taxation records. Some older central-Belton parcels also pay Bell County WCID #6 — check the parcel’s entity list on Bell CAD.

Worked example — the median-priced home. At the $322,442 median sale price and the tax-year 2025 combined rate of $2.0046 per $100, property tax before exemptions is about $6,463 per year. Texas’s school homestead exemption — raised to $140,000 for 2025 (Proposition 13 / SB 13) — applies to the school portion for an owner-occupied homestead: on this home, Belton ISD tax would be computed on $182,442 instead of $322,442, bringing the total to roughly $4,855 per year before the small Clearwater levy and any other exemptions. At the adopted 2026 combined rate of $2.0259, the same home runs about $6,532 before exemptions. Exemptions and the parcel’s exact entity list change the bill — verify any address on Bell CAD.

Three Creeks taxes — the MUD contrast

Three Creeks, the 571-acre master-planned community southwest of Belton (1,616 lots platted; 1,328 homes completed as of October 1, 2025, per Bell County MUD No. 1’s official statement; developer WBW Development Group), is in Belton’s extraterritorial jurisdiction — outside city limits. Its homes pay no City of Belton tax. Instead they pay Bell County Municipal Utility District No. 1:

Component	Rate per $100 (2025)
Bell County MUD No. 1 (in place of City of Belton)	$0.783
Derived combined rate (Belton ISD + MUD No. 1 + County + Road, before Clearwater)	$2.2651
Same home inside Belton city limits	$2.0046
Difference	≈ $0.26 per $100 — about $780 more per year on a $300,000 home, before exemptions

Also on Three Creeks: HOA dues are not published anywhere — not in builder materials, not in the MUD’s official statement. Any dues figure has to come from the HOA documents for the specific address. (For scale, closed sales in Three Creeks over the year to September 2026 showed a median of $306,915 on 137 closings, per CTXMLS records.)

The lakes

Measure	Belton Lake	Stillhouse Hollow Lake
Managing authority	U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District	U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District
Surface area at conservation pool	12,385 acres	6,430 acres
River	Leon River (Brazos basin)	Lampasas River
Shoreline	136 miles	58 to ~72 miles — USACE documents conflict (2020 fact sheet vs. Master Plan appendix)
Maximum depth	124 ft	107 ft
Completed	Impounded 1954	Dam completed 1968
Purposes	Flood control; drinking-water supply for Belton, Temple and area communities; recreation	Flood control; water conservation/supply; recreation
Public access	11 USACE parks; Belton Lake Outdoor Recreation Area; three marinas (Frank’s, Morgan’s Point, North Point Yacht Club)	Four USACE parks (two campgrounds); Chalk Ridge Falls Environmental Learning Center below the dam
Notable rule / note	Private docks are not allowed anywhere on the lake (USACE master plan)	~4.5 miles west of Belton; fishing for largemouth and smallmouth bass and channel catfish

Acreage variance note: Belton Lake also appears as 12,300 acres (USACE history page) and 12,135 acres (Texas Water Development Board 2003 survey). The 12,385-acre USACE/Recreation.gov figure is the one published here. The city of Morgan’s Point Resort (population 4,636, 2020 Census) sits on Belton Lake’s eastern shore and runs its own marina; its children attend Belton ISD.

Fort Hood — the facts

• Current name: Fort Hood. Redesignated from Fort Cavazos effective June 11, 2025, under Headquarters, Department of the Army General Orders No. 2025–14; ceremony held July 28, 2025.
• Namesake: Col. Robert B. Hood, a World War I Distinguished Service Cross recipient — a different man from Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood, the original namesake. The post carried the name Fort Cavazos (for Gen. Richard E. Cavazos) from May 9, 2023 until the 2025 redesignation.
• Stale-name alert: Homes.com, realty school guides and much current web content still call the post “Fort Cavazos.” Any Belton-area page using that name is working from pre-2025 sources.
• Size and units: about 214,000 acres spanning Bell and Coryell counties; headquarters of III Armored Corps and First Army Division West; home of the 1st Cavalry Division and 3rd Cavalry Regiment.
• Economic weight (2025): total economic output of roughly $37.9 billion and 53,767 direct employees, including about 34,474 active-duty military personnel (Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts 2025 military-installations study). Fort Hood has long been described by the Comptroller and area chambers as the largest single-site employer in Texas.
• Housing link: the majority of Fort Hood soldiers live off post in Bell and Coryell County communities (about 70%, per a 2010 Army statement) — the spillover is the structural demand under Belton housing. Belton itself counts 1,762 veterans (Census ACS 2020–2024).

Distances from Belton

Destination	Distance	Source
Temple	~8 miles east	Wikipedia — Belton, Texas
Morgan’s Point Resort	~7 miles north	Community sources
Three Creeks	~3.5 miles southwest	Bell County MUD No. 1 Official Statement
Fort Hood / Killeen	~20 miles west (I-14/US-190)	Homes.com, Belton market pages (approximate corridor figure; gate choice changes the drive)
Waco	~41–42 miles north (I-35)	Greyhound route data; Waco News Now distance guide
Austin	60 miles south (I-35)	Wikipedia — Belton, Texas

Belton basics in eight facts

1. Belton was settled in 1850 as Nolanville and renamed in 1851, when it became the county seat of newly created Bell County.

2. The city sits where the Blackland Prairie meets the Edwards Plateau; Nolan Creek runs through its center and the Leon River borders it to the northeast, across from Temple.

3. Belton covers 21.14 square miles (20.23 land, 0.91 water); ZIP 76513; area code 254.

4. It belongs to the Killeen–Temple metropolitan area, population 475,367 in the 2020 Census.

5. The University of Mary Hardin–Baylor was chartered by the Republic of Texas in 1845; its 170-acre Belton campus enrolls 3,914 students per university-reported figures (a separate IPEDS-derived count for 2024–25 says 3,321 — the university figure is the one published here, labeled as such).

6. Belton Lake was impounded in 1954 and the Stillhouse Hollow dam was completed in 1968 — both are Army Corps of Engineers projects built first for flood control and water supply.

7. Median household measures (Census ACS 2020–2024): median value of owner-occupied homes $258,700; median gross rent $1,252; owner-occupied rate 56.0%.

8. The Registry’s Belton-area coverage spans 11 communities — among them Three Creeks, Morgan’s Point Resort, Nolanville, Holland, Troy, Moody and Bartlett.

The verified expert for the Belton area

Neighborhood Registry checks one realtor per neighborhood directly against the issuing authority. The Belton area’s verified realtor is Angie Moore of Anchor Realty — the independently verified real estate agent for the Belton area in Texas — whose TREC license (712998-SA) Neighborhood Registry checked directly against the Texas Real Estate Commission’s public record; she was independently verified on September 16, 2026. She holds the verified realtor seats for 11 Belton-area communities. See the Belton city page for the full verified team and open seats, and our guide to living in Belton for the narrative tour.

Frequently asked questions

What is the median home price in Belton, Texas?

$322,442 by Homes.com’s trailing-12-month data (crawled August 2026), at an average of $185 per square foot across 1,036 sales. The median single-family sale price was $323,000. A local report using a different methodology put the April 2026 median at $334,900.

How much property tax will I pay on a Belton home?

For a Belton ISD home inside Belton city limits, the combined tax-year 2025 rate is $2.0046 per $100 of taxable value ($2.0259 at adopted 2026 rates). On the $322,442 median-priced home, that is about $6,463 a year before exemptions; Texas’s $140,000 school homestead exemption brings a homestead’s bill to roughly $4,855 before the small Clearwater levy and other exemptions.

What is Belton ISD’s state rating?

TEA rated Belton ISD B (80) overall in its 2025 accountability release — the district’s own report of the rating, with a 94% college, career and military readiness rate. The “A” in some realty comparison tables is a campus-level figure (Lake Belton High claims a campus A), not the district rating. TEA separately rated the district’s financial accountability (FIRST) at 98, an “A,” for 2024–25.

How is Three Creeks taxed differently from the rest of Belton?

Three Creeks is in Belton’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, not inside city limits, so its homes pay no City of Belton tax. They pay Bell County MUD No. 1 instead — $0.783 per $100 for 2025 — for a derived combined rate of $2.2651 per $100 versus $2.0046 in-city, roughly $780 more per year on a $300,000 home before exemptions. Its HOA dues are not published anywhere.

Who is the verified realtor for the Belton area?

Angie Moore of Anchor Realty, whose Texas license (TREC 712998-SA) Neighborhood Registry checked directly against the Texas Real Estate Commission’s public record; she was independently verified on September 16, 2026, and holds the verified realtor seats for 11 Belton-area communities, including Three Creeks and Morgan’s Point Resort.

Sources are named inline throughout; figures are as published by each source on the dates noted, and this page is reviewed against its sources as new data publishes.