West Fort Worth

The five-mile question

Fort Worth's own page describes its extraterritorial jurisdiction as the unincorporated land within five miles of the city limits.¹

Read that twice, because the consequence is counter-intuitive: land in the ETJ is not in the city, receives no city services and pays no city property tax — and the city's subdivision rules can still reach it. A parcel can be outside Fort Worth for every purpose a buyer cares about while still needing the city's approval to be divided.

That is the most common source of confusion on acreage west of the loop, and it is answerable from the city's own map before an offer goes in. Can you split this tract? covers the platting consequence, and Leaving a city's ETJ under SB 2038 covers what a landowner can now do about it.

The public improvement district nobody sees from the road

A PID levies an assessment on the property inside it, on top of ordinary property taxes, to fund improvements. Fort Worth established Public Improvement District 22 at Veale Ranch in 2023, and the city's page describes a district designed to support approximately 6,000 single-family homes.⁵

Whether a particular parcel sits inside a PID is a question for the city and the title company. It belongs before an offer, not at closing, because an assessment is a recurring cost that does not show up in a listing.

Codes, and a page that has not caught up with its own date

Fort Worth's adopted electrical code is the 2023 National Electrical Code, effective 1 March 2023.²

Two things sit beside that. The state adopted the 2026 edition effective 1 September 2026, under 16 Texas Administrative Code §73.100, published in the Texas Register on 28 August 2026.⁶ And the city's own page, read on 10 September 2026, still described a 2026 NEC as proposed, with a stated effective date of 1 September 2026 that had already passed.²

This is the ordinary condition of municipal code pages rather than a scandal, and it is exactly why the useful habit is to ask the permitting office what edition it is inspecting to for a permit issued this month. It is also why every source on this page carries the date we opened it. See Which electrical code applies to your lot.

Impact fees, and the date that fixes them

The city publishes current water and wastewater impact fees by meter size, for the period beginning 1 October 2025.³

The mechanic matters more than the number: fees are assessed based on the date the plat was recorded and the water meter size.⁴ So the fee attaching to your lot may be the one in force when the plat was recorded rather than the one on the page today — and the meter size is a design decision with a price on it. It is worth asking the plumbing designer early what the smallest meter that serves the house actually is. What a water meter costs before you build puts the Fort Worth and Benbrook schedules side by side.

If the lot turns out to be unincorporated

Then the county's rules govern rather than the city's, and there is no municipal building permit. On the Parker County side of the corridor that means platting through the county, a driveway permit from the commissioner precinct, and a septic permit with the county acting as the state's authorized agent — Who issues your building permit sets out the whole picture.