Why Every Home at The Ranch at Uptown Celina Pays the Same HOA Fee, and Not the Same Tax Bill

Walk the trail that runs along the southern edge of The Ranch at Uptown Celina on a Saturday morning and you will pass two front doors that tell very different financial stories. One belongs to a Taylor Morrison home on a 55-foot lot that closed somewhere in the upper $300,000s. A few doors down, a Toll Brothers Executive Collection home on a 70-foot lot closed near $700,000. Both owners pull into the same amenity center. Both kids splash in the same pool. Both dogs use the same fenced run.

Both owners also write the same check to the HOA every year. What they do not write the same check for is property tax, and the gap between those two numbers is the thing worth understanding before you pick a collection here.

The fee that stays put

The Ranch at Uptown Celina is a 150-acre section of the larger 675-acre Uptown Celina master plan, built out jointly by Taylor Morrison and Toll Brothers across four lot widths, 40, 55, 60 and 70 feet. More than 450 homes are planned across the two builders, all sharing one amenity package: a resort-style pool, a golf-cart-friendly hike and bike trail that ties directly into Celina's downtown square, green space, and a dog park.

That shared package is funded through the HOA, and the HOA dues here run close to $950 a year, or about $79 a month, regardless of which builder you buy from or which lot size you land on. A buyer in the Taylor Morrison 55s section and a buyer in the Toll Brothers Executive Collection are contributing an identical flat amount toward the same pool deck and the same trail maintenance.

That flat structure is worth sitting with for a second, because it is the exception in this community, not the rule.

The rate that does not

Property tax at The Ranch is a different animal. Because the community sits inside a Municipal Utility District, the tax bill layers a MUD rate on top of the standard city, county, school and college lines. People who have toured specific homes here have put the all-in rate, MUD included, somewhere between 2.81 percent and 2.86 percent of assessed value, depending on the tax year and homestead status of the property in question.

Unlike the HOA, that rate is not a flat number. It is a percentage, which means the dollar amount scales directly with what you paid for the house. A MUD exists to let a developer bond out the cost of water, sewer, drainage and street infrastructure before a city has fully absorbed the area, and homeowners repay that bond through the tax bill over time rather than through a one-time assessment. The pool does not get bigger because your home is more expensive. The bond obligation attached to your specific address does.

What that actually looks like in dollars

Toll Brothers has priced its four collections at The Ranch from the upper $300,000s to the low $700,000s. Put real numbers from that range next to the 2.81 percent combined rate and the shape of the gap becomes obvious.

The HOA line barely moves. The tax line nearly doubles between the entry price and the top of the Toll Brothers range. And the share of your total carrying cost that goes toward the shared amenities you actually use, the pool, the trail, the dog park, shrinks the more you spend on the house itself.

That $645,775 figure is not hypothetical. It is a Taylor Morrison Coral plan on Rangeland Road currently on the market with 3,496 square feet, four bedrooms and four and a half baths, sitting on one of the community's 60-foot lots. As of early September 2026, homes in that price band around The Ranch were averaging roughly 48 days to go pending and closing near 3 percent below list, which is normal, orderly pace for a still-building master plan rather than a sign of either urgency or stalling.

Why this changes how you should compare collections

If you are cross-shopping the Taylor Morrison sections against the Toll Brothers collections here, the builder's price sheet is only half the comparison. The other half is what that price sheet does to your monthly tax line, because the HOA is not going to be the variable that separates one collection from another. The MUD rate is.

Practically, that means a buyer stretching into the entry price range is paying meaningfully less in absolute tax dollars toward the same bonded infrastructure that serves the whole community, while still getting full-price access to the amenity center. A buyer at the top of the Toll Brothers range is carrying a materially larger share of that infrastructure debt for access to the exact same pool. Neither situation is unfair. It is simply how an ad valorem tax works next to a flat HOA fee. But it is the kind of math that does not show up on a builder's price sheet or a listing photo, and it is the reason two neighbors on the same street can have very different monthly obligations that have nothing to do with their mortgage rate.

It is also worth knowing that MUD rates are not fixed forever. As the district retires the bonds that financed the original infrastructure, the rate typically steps down over time, though the pace of that decline depends on the district's specific bond schedule rather than a fixed calendar. Buyers who plan to hold for a decade or more are generally financing a rate that is closer to its peak today than it will be in year twelve.

The question to ask before you sign

Before comparing a Taylor Morrison price against a Toll Brothers price at The Ranch, ask for the actual combined tax rate on the specific lot and tax year you are buying into, not a community-wide average. Rates can shift slightly year to year, and the answer changes your real monthly number more than the builder's name on the sign does.

A few questions we hear often

Does the HOA fee differ between the Taylor Morrison and Toll Brothers sections? Based on what buyers and builders have reported, the dues are effectively the same across the community, close to $950 a year, since both builders' homeowners draw from the same amenity center, pool and trail system.

Is the tax rate the same across every lot size? The MUD portion applies community-wide, but the total combined rate can vary slightly by tax year and by whether a homestead exemption has been filed, so the 2.81 to 2.86 percent range is a starting point, not a guarantee for any single address.

Will my MUD tax rate go down over time? Generally yes, as the district pays down its bonds, but the timeline depends on that district's specific repayment schedule rather than a fixed number of years, so it is worth asking for the district's current bond status before assuming a specific future rate.

If you are weighing a Taylor Morrison lot against a Toll Brothers collection at The Ranch at Uptown Celina, or comparing this community against another MUD-financed neighborhood in Celina, LivingWell Realty can run the real monthly numbers with you, not just the builder's base price. Brent spends most of his week inside exactly these kinds of new-construction comparisons, and our buyer's guide and mortgage calculator are built to help you see the full carrying cost before you fall for a floor plan. If a move here depends on selling first, start with a free, current home value estimate so you know what you are working with on both ends of the deal.