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

2025 · Regular session · House bill

HB5435

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Official caption: Relating to required lease terms for public property leased to a nongovernmental entity.

Signed by governorSource-checked explanation published

Official report lists House author(s): Bell, Keith. 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.

HB5435 removes one required term from certain leases of public property: a lease between an institution of higher education, as defined in Education Code 61.003, and another person no longer has to require the tenant to give the institution a construction commencement notice at least 90 days before work begins.
The referenced definition covers public technical institutes, junior colleges, senior colleges and universities, medical and dental units, state colleges and other defined higher-education agencies—not every private college.
The change applies only to leases entered into on or after September 1, 2025, the act's effective date.

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What does it do?

HB5435 removes one required term from certain leases of public property: a lease between an institution of higher education, as defined in Education Code 61.003, and another person no longer has to require the tenant to give the institution a construction commencement notice at least 90 days before work begins. The exception concerns construction, alteration or repair of an improvement to the leased property. Final law, Section 1.

The referenced definition covers public technical institutes, junior colleges, senior colleges and universities, medical and dental units, state colleges and other defined higher-education agencies—not every private college. The bill leaves the reproduced payment-bond and performance-bond requirements in place. It is an exception to the statutory requirement for a notice clause, not a blanket permission to disregard other lease terms, construction rules or bond obligations. Education Code 61.003(8); final law.

The change applies only to leases entered into on or after September 1, 2025, the act’s effective date. It does not rewrite earlier leases. The governor signed it June 20, 2025. Final law, Sections 2–3; official history.

What changed along the way?

The introduced bill proposed a different approach: apply specified public-work-contract thresholds to the bond clauses and allow 30 days’ commencement notice for an “emergency,” defined as a sudden, urgent occurrence requiring immediate action, instead of the usual 90 days. The referenced thresholds were over $100,000 for performance bonds and over $25,000 or $50,000 for payment bonds depending on the governmental entity. Those bond-threshold and emergency-notice proposals were not enacted by HB5435. Introduced text; referenced Government Code 2253.021.

The House committee substitute replaced those proposals with the higher-education notice exception. That language survived in the House-passed, Senate-report and enrolled texts. The amendment index lists no floor amendments; this was a committee-substitute change. House substitute; House-passed text; Senate report; amendment index; all text versions.

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?

Covered higher-education institutions and their tenants gain flexibility to arrange improvement work without this mandatory 90-day notice term in new leases. Contractors and subcontractors retain the bond protections reproduced in the act. Institutions may lose a mandatory advance-notice mechanism, although other contractual protections can matter. The law neither guarantees faster construction nor establishes a dollar saving for a tenant or taxpayer.

The latest indexed fiscal note, May 22 for the engrossed bill, anticipates no significant state or local fiscal implication and assumes costs can be absorbed with existing resources. The April 22 introduced and April 25 substitute notes reach the same conclusions. No dollar estimate, multi-year cost table or appropriation is provided. Applicable fiscal note; introduced note; substitute note.

Review boundary: all final sections, history, all five text versions, the empty floor-amendment index, all three fiscal notes and date-specific statutory definitions and bond thresholds were checked. The lease section is the provision originally added by 2023 HB2518, not the separate section numbered 2252.909 concerning experience modifiers. This is not an audit of any institution’s actual lease or construction project.

Official sources

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