Fort Hood BAH Rates 2026

How BAH Is Calculated Here

The BAH survey here samples Killeen and the surrounding Bell County rental market, sets a median for each of six housing profiles, adds average utilities, and assigns a profile to each paygrade.

It is a median, not a ceiling — half the qualifying homes cost more. And it cannot fall while you are assigned here, only rise.

What makes Killeen different is what happens after the BAH lands in your account, because Texas takes its revenue from property rather than income, and Bell County's nominal combined rate runs close to 2% — Killeen ISD at $0.8778 per $100, the City of Killeen at $0.7014, Bell County at $0.3125, and Central Texas College at $0.0900.

That nominal rate is not what an owner-occupier pays, and this is the single most useful thing on this page. Texas Proposition 13, passed in November 2025 with 79% of the vote, raised the school-district homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000, retroactive to tax years beginning 1 January 2025. School tax is the largest line on a Killeen bill, and at the local median that exemption erases about 59% of the school-tax base.

The practical consequence: the tax figure printed on a listing is probably wrong for you. Roughly half of Killeen's rental stock is scattered single-family houses owned by investors, and an investor-owned property carries no homestead exemption. If you are looking at former rentals — and in Killeen you will be — the historical tax number on the sheet overstates what you will pay by a wide margin. The figure below applies the exemption.

What BAH Actually Covers at Fort Hood

The median Killeen home sold for $238,841 in August 2026 (Redfin), at $126 a square foot, down 0.5% year over year. VA loan, 0% down, 6.77% thirty-year, funding fee financed, homestead exemption applied:

	Monthly
Principal & interest	$1,586
Property tax (≈1.47% effective after the $140,000 school exemption)	$292
Homeowners insurance	$326
Total	$2,203

Against BAH with dependents:

Rank	BAH	Covers the payment?
E-4	$1,662	Short $541
E-5	$1,695	Short $508
E-6	$1,920	Short $283
E-7	$2,070	Short $133
O-3	$2,340	Covers, $137 left

Without the homestead exemption — which is what an investor pays, and what an old listing will show — the tax line is roughly $394 instead of $292. File the homestead exemption with the Bell County Appraisal District the year you buy. It is free and it is worth about $1,200 a year.

Texas homeowners insurance is expensive and it is not the coast doing it. The statewide average on $300,000 of dwelling coverage is $3,908 a year, driven substantially by hail. Central Texas sits in the hail corridor, and roof claims are what price this market. Ask specifically about the roof deductible — a separate percentage-based wind and hail deductible is common here and does not behave like the flat dollar deductible on the rest of the policy.

A VA service-connected disability rating waives the funding fee, about $33 a month.

How It Compares

A three-bedroom rents for about $1,350 in Killeen (Zillow, September 2026) — and rent fell $45 over the past year.

Owning the median home costs $2,203. That is $853 a month more than renting, before maintenance. It is the widest owning-versus-renting gap of any market on this site outside California and the Northeast, in the cheapest houses on this site. The gap is not the house. It is the tax bill on one side and unusually soft rents on the other.

Buying passes renting at about month 175 — fourteen and a half years. There is no Army assignment cycle that reaches that.

The softness is structural, not a blip. HUD's Killeen-Temple market profile put rental vacancy at 10.6%, up from 9.0% four years earlier, with apartment vacancy at 9.7%. About 49% of renters here occupy single-family houses against roughly 26% in a typical metro — the signature of a large scattered investor-landlord stock built for a garrison that sizes up and down. Homes now sit 63 days, up from 57. Prices and rents are both drifting down.

What to do with this: rent. This is the clearest call on the site and it is not close. If you are set on buying anyway — a long assignment, a spouse's career anchored here, a deliberate rental investment — understand that you are buying into an oversupplied rental market, which is exactly where a PCS landlord discovers there is no tenant at the rent the spreadsheet assumed. The price at which BAH covers everything is $174,179 for an E-5 and $202,799 for an E-6. Run the real number in the BAH calculator.