The PID Surcharge Vanished From Trophy Club Water Bills. Here's Where It Went.

For almost two decades, owning a home in The Highlands at Trophy Club meant knowing one specific line on your water bill: the PID surcharge, the charge that funded fire service and the roads and utilities built when the neighborhood went in back in 2007. Every October, the line renewed. It was the town's best-known oddity, the one out-of-town buyers always asked about.

Then, starting with the October 2025 billing cycle, the line stopped showing up.

If you're preparing to sell in Trophy Club this year, "the PID charge went away" is the version a buyer's agent will hear first, probably from a neighbor or an old listing description. It's also the version that creates a problem at the closing table, because it isn't quite true. The charge didn't disappear. It moved. And the move matters less than a second, quieter fact: what a buyer actually pays at closing in Trophy Club now depends more on which of the town's half-dozen HOAs governs a specific address than on anything to do with the PID at all.

What Actually Changed, and When

The Town of Trophy Club and Trophy Club Municipal Utility District No. 1 expanded the district's boundaries effective January 1, 2025, so that the entire town, including the former PID footprint in The Highlands, falls under one taxing authority. As a direct result, the monthly PID surcharge that used to appear on Highlands-area water bills stopped being collected starting with the billing period that began October 1, 2025. In its place, residents in that area now pay an equivalent amount through their Trophy Club MUD 1 property tax bill, the same mechanism everyone else in town already used. The change first showed up on 2025 tax-year bills, due January 31, 2026, which means anyone selling a Highlands home this fall is listing a property that has already gone through one full cycle under the new system.

The district's own budget materials describe the goal plainly: a simplified, uniform process for billing and collection across the whole town. That's true from an administrative standpoint. It is not the same as a lower carrying cost. The district's reported average annual tax bill for water and wastewater service rose from $464.63 in 2024 to $558.06 in 2025, an increase of roughly 20 percent, which suggests the "simplification" folded costs together rather than shrinking them.

The Assessment That Never Moved

Here's the part a seller needs to say out loud, because a buyer's agent unfamiliar with Trophy Club will not think to ask about it: removing the surcharge from the water bill did nothing to the separate, fixed PID infrastructure assessment that still applies to lots inside the original Highlands PID boundary. That assessment, which the Town's own PID FAQ describes as a one-time allocation tied to the infrastructure that built the neighborhood, is typically retired over 20 to 40 years and can be paid off early by a buyer or carried forward at closing. Publicly posted fee schedules put the current annual assessment somewhere in the range of just over $1,000 to a bit above $2,300 per lot, scaled by lot size, and it has nothing to do with fire service or the tax-bill change at all.

A seller who tells a buyer "the PID went away" is describing the surcharge, not the assessment. The assessment is still attached to the lot, still collected by Denton County alongside the ad valorem tax, and still worth disclosing with a specific payoff figure rather than a general reassurance. Buyers researching older Highlands listings, where the surcharge language is baked into the description, are the ones most likely to be confused, and the confusion lands on the seller's side of the table first.

The Real Variable Is the HOA, Not the Tax Bill

Once the tax mechanics are settled, the number that actually swings a Trophy Club closing statement is which homeowners association governs the specific section a house sits in. Trophy Club is not one HOA. It's several, each with its own management company and its own resale certificate and transfer fee schedule, and the differences are large enough to matter.

Two things worth understanding about that spread. First, the spread itself isn't really a negotiating problem, because Texas law already caps what any of these associations can charge for a resale certificate at $375, with a $75 ceiling on updates. Senate Bill 711, passed by the 89th Texas Legislature and effective September 1, 2025, extended a version of that same ceiling to condominium associations statewide, which previously had no cap at all. Every HOA in the table above already sits at or under the $375 figure, so the real variable for a Trophy Club seller isn't the fee amount, it's knowing which management company holds the paperwork and how quickly that company turns a request around.

Second, the fee gap correlates with something a seller can't change but should account for when pricing the timeline: which era of the town the home sits in. Closed-sale figures through late July 2026 put the median in Trophy Club's original 1980s and 1990s village sections, built around the country club, at roughly $585,000, against roughly $952,500 in the larger 2000s-era sections that make up most of current transaction volume. Different section, different price point, different HOA, different management company, different fee. In Trophy Club, "section" is the unit that actually organizes the market, more than the town-wide median a portal search will show.

A Detail Out-of-Town Buyers Miss

One more piece of friction worth flagging before a listing goes live: Trophy Club sits mostly in Denton County but extends into Tarrant County as well. A relocating buyer used to a single-county closing in another market can be caught off guard by which county's appraisal district and tax office actually bills a given address, particularly for homes near the town's southern edge. It rarely derails a transaction, but it's the kind of question a seller's disclosure conversation should get ahead of rather than leave for title work to surface late.

What This Means at the Table

None of this changes whether a Trophy Club home is a good sale this fall. It changes what the seller's side needs to have ready before the first showing. That means a payoff figure for the PID assessment, not just a reference to its existence. It means knowing, by neighborhood number, which of the five management companies to call for a resale certificate and how long that company typically takes. And it means being able to explain, in one sentence, why the water bill got shorter without the true cost of ownership doing the same.

A Few Straight Answers

Does the PID assessment transfer automatically to a new owner? Yes. The assessment stays with the lot and is collected through the county tax bill alongside the ad valorem tax. A buyer can pay off the remaining balance at closing or let it continue on the existing schedule, but either way it should be quantified in the disclosure conversation rather than left as a line item to discover later.

Which HOA governs my specific home? It depends on the neighborhood number, not just the subdivision name. The Highlands alone is split across five management arrangements. The Town's community development office can confirm which HOA applies to a specific address before a listing goes live.

Is the $375 resale certificate fee negotiable? No. It's a statutory ceiling under the Texas Property Code, not a per-association choice, and it now applies to condominium associations too following a 2025 legislative update. What varies is turnaround time, which is worth confirming with the management company early rather than during option period.

Selling a Trophy Club home this year means getting these details right before a buyer's agent asks about them. Marcontell-Gilchrest Group works this market section by section, HOA by HOA, and can walk you through exactly what your specific address carries into closing. Contact us when you're ready to talk about listing.