Assembling and filing the application — Texas

The shape of the phase

By the time a Texas deal reaches assembly, the substantive decisions — site, financing structure, unit mix — are largely made. What's left is a document-production exercise against fixed dates, run by two agencies that don't share a calendar: TDHCA administers the tax credit itself, and for bond deals the Texas Bond Review Board (BRB) separately administers the private-activity-bond volume cap those deals also need. There is no joint application the way a single agency might run both halves at once.

There is no "Round 2" the way California's CTCAC runs a second 9% cycle roughly six months later. Miss the February 27 deadline, or fall short at the July Board meeting, and the only within-year recourse is the Waiting List — which depends entirely on other applicants' credits being returned.

Two agencies, three kinds of issuer, and a real fork in who applies

For Priority 0, 1, or 2 bond applicants, sequencing is strict: BRB will not reserve volume cap until it has evidence from TDHCA that the HTC application has been submitted. Once BRB emails that an applicant is next in line, there are 3 business days to file the complete HTC application with TDHCA — miss it, and BRB cancels the slot and moves to the next applicant in the queue, with no appeal path described anywhere in the rules.

The BRB's own closing-fee exposure (the greater of $1,000 or 0.025% of certified bond principal) is small relative to the size of these deals, and real 2026 data shows behavior that tracks it: in two of the state's largest regions alone, 20 of 33 identifiable bond reservation line items (61%) were marked WITHDRAWN, representing $384 million in requested bond volume — more than the $300.3 million that actually reached CLOSED status across the same sample. Reserving a lottery slot functions, in practice, much more like a cheap, easily-abandoned option than a firm commitment.

The application is a dual PDF-and-Excel filing that must match, byte for byte

TDHCA's own rule states it plainly: the Applicant must timely upload a PDF copy and an Excel copy of the complete Application to the Department's secure web transfer server, and "the PDF copy and Excel copy of the Application must match." Two independently-produced renderings of the same roughly 200 underlying facts have to agree before staff will even accept the filing. Some physical delivery survives the modernization: checks and original Carryover Allocation Agreements are still hand-delivered to TDHCA's Austin office by deadline.

Everything below is due, together, on the Full Application Delivery Date: the Environmental Site Assessment, Market Analysis, Scope and Cost Review, an appraisal (if acquisition basis is claimed), the Primary Market Area map, a feasibility report, any triggered de-concentration resolutions, the notification certifications required by 10 TAC §11.203 (nine required data points, sent to Neighborhood Organizations, the school district, the mayor and governing body, the county judge and commissioners, and the state senator and representative — notification, not approval, for most sites), and the Final Input from Elected Officials — the Local Government Support resolution and State Representative letter — on that same date.

Freshness clocks, and one that doesn't move with the deal's own timeline

Bond-lottery deals carry a second, calendar-fixed clock with no relationship to the deal's own schedule: an executed earnest money contract must be effective at submission and expire no earlier than December 1 of the preceding year, extendable through March 1 of the program year. Within 3 business days of a reservation notification, the borrower must show either a filed TDHCA application or that the earnest money contract is still in force — or the bond reservation automatically expires.

Where you compete decides more than how well you score

An application competes in exactly one bucket: first the USDA or At-Risk set-aside (processed statewide, by score alone), and if not eligible for either, one of 26 region/subregion buckets — 13 Uniform State Service Regions, each split Urban and Rural. The Nonprofit Set-aside is layered across whichever bucket an application already won, as a floor check, not a separate pool — and a qualifying ownership structure is automatically enrolled in it unless affirmatively waived.

Six de-concentration rules operate as hard eligibility gates, independent of score, and they are not theoretical: TDHCA's own 2026 data shows three real head-to-head Two Mile Same Year conflicts, and in every case the lower scorer didn't just lose — it disappeared from the round entirely.

A separate, stricter gate applies to site features: an undisclosed Undesirable Site Feature — within 300 feet of a junkyard or active landfill, within 500 feet of active railroad tracks or heavy industry, within 2 miles of a large refinery, and eight other named categories — means "the Application shall be terminated by staff." There is no discretionary mitigation window for an undisclosed feature the way California frames the same problem.

The political-support bloc — worth more than almost any other category, and irrevocable the instant you submit

"Once a [resolution/letter/statement] is submitted to the Department it may not be changed or withdrawn" — the QAP says this, in essentially the same words, for all three inputs. A premature ask that comes back neutral or negative cannot be re-solicited later in the same round. The QAP itself warns against the opposite mistake, too: it encourages applicants not to request the State Representative letter well in advance of the deadline.

The stakes are not abstract. A single legislator's letter is worth a 16-point swing between full support and outright opposition — larger than almost any design or financing choice a developer controls — in a round where a plurality of active applications converge on an identical score.

Elections that lock when you hit submit

Where the sources disagree

Whether Texas's one conditional cap on bond-financed basis is actually active for 2026 is not settled by what's publicly posted. The Bond Review Board's own 2026 program-year page cites cumulative residential-rental demand "as of October 20, 2024" while describing the 2026 program year — a citation that reads like a stale carryover from an earlier year's page rather than a confirmed answer. Until the real October 20, 2025 demand total is checked against 55.75% of the 2026 ceiling, a 4% deal's underwriting shouldn't assume either that the cap is off, or that the federal 25% test is the only ceiling in play.

Even TDHCA's own materials don't agree on the exact citation for the Readiness to Proceed rule: the Application Log's own legend cites one subsection, and the QAP's running text cross-references the same rule elsewhere as a different one. Confirm the correct subsection against the specific program year's adopted QAP before relying on it in a scoring appeal.

Texas re-adopts its entire QAP from scratch every year, and the Governor holds a further line-item modification power on a fixed December 1 deadline — exercised in the current cycle on a different rule (the two-return ineligibility provision) than any of the point values cited in this guide. A handful of major point categories were spot-checked stable between the 2025 and 2026 QAP, but that is not a full category-by-category confirmation. Treat every point value and threshold in this phase as a per-year setting to re-confirm against the specific year's adopted QAP, never as a constant.

After you file

TDHCA republishes both the Application Submission Log and the Award and Waiting List repeatedly through the cycle — at least seven dated Log versions and five dated Award/Waiting-List versions across the 2026 round alone — rather than only after fixed deadlines. It is a live calibration feed, not a snapshot.

Any unrelated person or entity may file a Third-Party Request for Administrative Deficiency against a competing application, bringing new, material information to staff's attention; the QAP explicitly disregards any such request that is really a challenge to a competitor's own scoring, and the requestor must serve the documentation on both TDHCA and the Applicant at the same time.

Appeals run on a 7-calendar-day filing window from publication of results; the Executive Director must respond within 14 days; Board review is confined strictly to the original application and documentation already on file, with no new evidence admitted at any stage, and the Board's decision is final. Winning an appeal does not guarantee an award: TDHCA's own 2026 data names five appeals, every one granted — four went on to be recommended for award in July, and the fifth never appears in the final Award and Waiting List at all.

Errors don't stay confined to the round you filed in. TDHCA's own 2026 Credit Returns tab names five developments returning previously-awarded credit mid-cycle — real, dated evidence that an award from a 2022–2024 round can still come back years later: Nova Lofts ($144,397, Jan. 21, 2026), Parkside at Buffalo Bayou ($2,000,000, Apr. 16, 2026), Eden Heights ($12,631, Jun. 1, 2026), Woodcrest Apartments ($1,627,133, Jun. 26, 2026), and Westwind of Plainview ($1,058,716, Jul. 1, 2026).