Guide
The Travis County tax delinquent list: where it lives and how to read it
Travis County publishes its entire delinquent tax roll as a CSV file that the tax office refreshes every business day. It is free, it is official, and it is one of the strongest motivated-seller signals an Austin wholesaler can work. This page shows where to download it, what each column means, and the quirks that trip everyone up the first time they parse it.
Where to get the file
The Travis County Tax Office publishes the list as TaxDelqOpenData.csv on its own site — no sign-up, no fee, no license beyond the county's open-data terms. It is replaced in place every business day, so the copy you download at 9am is not always the copy at 3pm. The file runs about two megabytes and roughly eight thousand rows, one per delinquent tax account.
The columns that matter
The file carries about twenty columns. The ones worth working:
- Total Due — the current delinquent balance. A $2,000 balance and a $22,000 balance are two very different conversations.
- 1st Year Delinquent — how far back the problem goes. Read it as years owed, not dollars, and you know who has been ignoring mail the longest.
- Owner Name — the person or entity on the hook, plus full mailing address, which is what a mail merge actually needs.
- Street Number / Street Name / Property Zip — the property itself, as opposed to the owner's mailing address. The two are often different.
Quirks to expect on the first parse
The file is a working export, not a polished dataset. Things we learned reading it daily:
- The file starts with a byte-order mark, so decode it as
utf-8-sigor your first column name gets an invisible prefix. - Owner names are stored as
LAST Firstin caps, and long names get cut off around forty characters. - Roughly half the rows show
0000as the first delinquent year — unknown, not year zero. - Property zips arrive as nine digits; truncate to five before grouping by neighborhood.
- The county can and does change the layout between editions, so a script keyed to column positions will break. Key it to column names.
What it looks like today
These are real residential records from the county file as of Sep 30, 2026 — pulled live from the county at the moment this page loaded, not a stored example:
| Property | Owner | Total due | Delinquent since |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7209 Nutria Run, Austin, TX 78744 | Raymond A Alvarado | $8,517 | 2 yrs |
| 6903 Deatonhill Dr, Austin, TX 78745 | Denise Herring | $10,188 | 3 yrs |
| 14511 Running Deer Trl, Austin, TX 78734 | Sergio Aguilar | $10,863 | 3 yrs |
| 6206 Felix Ave, Austin, TX 78741 | Rodolfo Rodriguez | $12,551 | 2 yrs |
What the file cannot tell you
The county gives you today's state of every account. It does not give you yesterday's, so it cannot say which accounts went delinquent this week, which paid off, or which are sliding toward the tax-sale list — only a history kept across editions can. It also carries no phone numbers or email addresses; that takes a separate skip-tracing step. And every wholesaler in town can download the same file, so the raw data alone gets you to the same list everyone else is working.
That gap is the product: DistressBase reads this same official file every business day, keeps the history, and sends you only what changed since yesterday for $149 a month.
DistressBase is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how this guide stays current with the county's file.