Texas Total Homestead Exemption for a Line of Duty Surviving Spouse

Tax Code section 11.133 exempts the total appraised value of the residence homestead of the surviving spouse of a member of the armed services of the United States who was killed or fatally injured in the line of duty. A surviving spouse for this purpose is the individual who was married to the service member at the time of the member's death. There is no disability rating anywhere in this section. It turns on the death, not on a VA rating, and the service member does not have to have been a veteran in the discharged sense. That makes it a different benefit from the surviving spouse provisions inside sections 11.131 and 11.132, which follow a disabled veteran's exemption forward. The exemption lasts as long as the surviving spouse does not remarry. If the surviving spouse buys a different home, the exemption carries to the new homestead as the dollar amount received on the old one in its last qualifying year, not as a renewed total exemption. The chief appraiser has to issue a written certificate with the information needed to compute that amount. File form 50-114 with the county appraisal district. The general deadline is before May 1. The five-year late filing window in section 11.439 is written for the disabled veteran, not for a surviving spouse, so a late application here is on the ordinary late-filing rules rather than that one. A surviving spouse of a veteran who died of a service-connected condition rather than in the line of duty should read the section 11.136 entry instead. That section was added for exactly that gap.