Texas Bills Explained

2025 Texas sessionsRegular and both called sessions have ended. This index covers House and Senate bills, not resolutions. Statuses come from official reports.

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2025 · Regular session · House bill

HB3526

HB3526 requires the Texas Bond Review Board to maintain a public, searchable online database of proposed and issued local-government bonds.

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Official caption: Relating to fiscal transparency for bonds issued by local governmental entities.

Signed by governorSource-checked explanation published

Official report lists House author(s): Capriglione, Bumgarner, Wilson, Metcalf. This does not identify sponsors or amendment drafters.

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Bill explanation published · Version and amendment review scope is stated below · Individual amendment records may not be separately annotated.

Bill highlights

Selected points from the published explanation. Follow each point to its source-linked context; conditions and limits may matter.

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What does it do?

HB3526 requires the Texas Bond Review Board to maintain a public, searchable online database of proposed and issued local-government bonds. Its readable tables must show principal, estimated interest, estimated total repayment and the estimated minimum annual amount needed for debt service—the payments needed to repay the debt. The board’s deadline to establish it was September 1, 2026. Final law

The act adds three reporting requirements:

  • Bond elections: Local governments must report at least 20 days before election day, giving the election date, proposition numbers, estimated issuance costs, estimated minimum annual debt service, purposes and any other required information. Within 20 days after election day they must report total votes, votes for and against, updated information and other required data. The board must publish an election-results report.
  • Approved but unissued bonds: By September 30 each year, a local government with voter-approved but unissued bonds must submit the statutory report concerning such authorizations during the most recent fiscal year. Required fields include the total unissued authorization, authorizing law, applicable proposition numbers and estimated issuance costs, estimated minimum annual debt service after issuance and other information the board requires.
  • Repayment: By December 31 of each even-numbered year, the board must report to the legislature’s finance-related standing committees on each voter-approved local bond that has been issued. The report includes the original estimated total repayment, principal and interest already paid, minimum debt service for each year of the biennium and any tax-rate increase required for bond repayment.

The attorney general must send the debt information collected during securities review for use in the new repayment report as well as the existing debt-statistics report. This builds on earlier reporting law; it is not Texas’s first collection of local debt data. The board may adopt rules for the annual unissued-bond and biennial repayment reports. Existing debt-reporting framework

The act took effect September 1, 2025, after being signed May 28. It requires information, not approval or rejection of a particular bond, and does not itself impose a new tax, cap borrowing or change the vote needed to pass a proposition. Estimates are not guarantees of the eventual borrowing cost. Official history

What changed along the way?

The introduced bill proposed the searchable database and biennial repayment report. The House committee substitute added pre-election and post-election reporting and the annual report on voter-approved but unissued bonds. Those additions survived. Introduced text · House committee text · Text versions

The House then adopted one floor amendment, offered by Capriglione, on May 1. Its nine instructions added minimum annual debt-service figures to the database, pre-election report, unissued-bond report and biennial repayment report, with related wording and numbering changes. These requirements appear in the enrolled law. The House-passed, Senate committee and final operative texts match; no later Senate or conference amendment changed them. Amendment index · Complete amendment

For the full amendment record, open the official amendment index.

Official bill versions

Compare the published text versions in the official text index. A change is not attributed to a specific amendment here without a verified record.

Who could benefit—and who could bear the costs?

Voters, residents, journalists and legislators could more easily compare proposed borrowing, unused voter authorizations and actual repayment. Showing interest and annual debt service helps distinguish a bond’s face amount from its repayment burden. The benefit depends on accurate submissions and useful publication; the law alone does not prove that all required data are complete.

Local governments must prepare and update the reports. The Bond Review Board must build and maintain the database and analyze repayment information. The latest fiscal note estimates $290,000 in state general-revenue costs for fiscal years 2026–2027: $210,000 in 2026 and $80,000 in 2027. Its assumptions are one additional employee costing $160,000 over the two years and a one-time $130,000 website cost in 2026. It projects $80,000 annually for 2028–2030 and anticipates no significant local fiscal effect. Fiscal note

The bill itself makes no appropriation. These are implementation estimates, not measured spending, household tax increases or the cost of the bonds reported in the database.

Review boundary: This verifies the enacted reporting duties and all amendments, not the database’s current completeness, an issuer’s compliance or the accuracy of a particular bond estimate.

Official sources

Catalog report retrieved 2026-10-25. Check the official record for corrections or later changes.