The 3-of-7 rule: which wildlife management practices Texas requires

The rule, in plain English

Tax Code §23.51(7) lists seven categories of wildlife management practices. To qualify, the land must be actively managed using at least three of them:

• •Habitat control — actively managing vegetation and land to benefit your target species, such as brush management or native re-seeding.
• •Erosion control — work that keeps soil in place, such as pond and gully repair or streamside protection.
• •Predator control — managing the predators or nest competitors that suppress the species you manage for.
• •Providing supplemental supplies of water — adding water where the land doesn’t naturally carry enough, such as wildlife waterers.
• •Providing supplemental supplies of food — such as food plots or feeders, alongside managing the land’s natural forage.
• •Providing shelters — such as nest boxes and brush piles, and keeping the cover your species actually uses.
• •Making census counts to determine population — counts and surveys that track whether the management is working.

Three is the floor, not the plan

Three practices is the statutory minimum, and a plan built exactly at the minimum has no margin. The plans our software generates recommend five: if a practice slips during the year — a pond repair that doesn’t happen, a burn that gets rained out — you still stand above the floor.

The part most people miss: intensity, every year

Picking three categories isn’t the whole test. TPWD publishes intensity standards for each ecoregion, and they are annual recurring requirements — not a one-time setup in year one.

One example at the scale that matters: in the Cross Timbers region, brush management is expected to treat at least 10% of the total area designated in the plan, or 10 acres, whichever is smaller — annually.

Standards differ by ecoregion, and county lines are not ecoregion lines — your tract’s governing ecoregion is where the land actually sits. Our county pages list the standards for each region.

Find your county’s ecoregion and standards →

Primary use is the other half of qualifying

The land must already hold 1-d-1 open-space (or timber) valuation, and wildlife management must become its primary use (Tax Code §23.51(1), (2), (7); 34 TAC §9.2004).

Competing uses don’t have to stop — grazing can continue, a hay lease can continue — but they must become secondary to the wildlife management, and the plan must say so explicitly.

The minimum-acreage myth

There is no statewide minimum acreage for wildlife management use. A minimum — the wildlife-use requirement — applies only if the tract was reduced in acreage since January 1 of the preceding tax year (34 TAC §9.2005). Unchanged acreage means no acreage test at all.

Where it does apply, it works as per-region ratio ranges — Cross Timbers and Prairies runs 93–95%, with a separate wildlife-management property association band (91–92% there, §9.2005(d)) and a band for TPWD-designated endangered or threatened species habitat (§9.2005(e)). Your county page shows the ranges for your region.

Keep records like it matters

Log what you do: dates, quantities, counts, photos. Many appraisal districts request the PWD-888 annual report from wildlife-management accounts, and whether and when varies by county — there is no one universal date, so ask your district.

Even where the district doesn’t routinely ask, it can request the report at any time. With a season of logs in hand, the request is a formality instead of a scramble.