# Texas Toll Roads Stay Tolled — Methodology

Evidence cutoff: 2026-09-02.

## Scope

The comparative public-system set includes NTTA, HCTRA, CTRMA, TxDOT's Central Texas Turnpike System, the Grand Parkway System, and the two material Fort Bend County toll authorities where audited records support a bounded treatment.

The transaction and concession set includes North Tarrant Express, LBJ Express, NTE 35W, SH 130 Segments 5–6, and the 2024 SH 288 concession termination and public transition.

This is a material-system comparison. It is not a denominator for all Texas toll revenue.

## Five separate tests

1. Has cumulative project cash recovered the initial construction cost?
2. Is the individual road debt-free?
3. Is the broader system debt-free?
4. Does the public entity retain legal tolling authority?
5. Does a concessionaire retain contractual toll-revenue rights?

A positive answer to the first question does not answer the other four.

## Accounting rules

- Preserve each source's fiscal year and reporting entity.
- Do not combine accrual operating expense with cash principal repayment as one expense line.
- Depreciation is noncash.
- Principal is not an income-statement expense.
- Capital spending may be funded by current revenue, beginning cash, reserves, grants, or new debt.
- Net position is not cash.
- Public transfers and private equity distributions are reported separately.
- Unavailable fields remain unavailable rather than becoming zero.

## Normalized comparison rule

The per-$100 chart includes only CTTS and Grand Parkway because both rows come from the same TxDOT FY2025 report, use the same fiscal year, the same operating-revenue denominator, and the same category schedule.

NTTA is excluded because its gross Trust denominator includes investment and other non-toll revenue. HCTRA is excluded because selected cash uses were funded by several sources. CTRMA and Fort Bend are excluded because the public records do not currently support the same category bridge.

## Open evidence items

- Final Texas Transportation Commission order and project list for the Harris County request under Transportation Code §284.008(d).
- Current ultimate-equity chain for SH 130 Concession Company.
- Complete CTRMA FY2025 audited-to-monthly category bridge.
- Exact page-level FBGPTRA headline extraction.

No open item is replaced with an estimate.

## Current-edition correction — 2026-10-16

This edition preserves the original 2026-09-02 evidence cutoff and numerical assumptions. It makes one targeted HCTRA classification correction: the $398.6 million is total surplus-revenue transfers to other county funds, including the annual mobility transfer, for roads and related facilities outside the toll system. It is not solely the annual mobility payment. The annual mobility component is not separately quantified here. The supporting record is [HCTRA’s FY2025 report, Note 10, printed page 46](https://auditor.harriscountytx.gov/Portals/auditor/documents/ACFRs/TR%20Final%209-30-25.pdf), reviewed on 2026-10-16. This does not refresh every underlying source or resolve the four open evidence items above.

The historical workbook was truncated and cannot be opened as a complete XLSX. The repaired current edition preserves three complete recovered sheets and all eight recoverable formulas. The remaining six sheets reconstruct only figures and distinctions explicitly available in the article and companion CSVs. They identify their sources and missing historical coverage. Original missing formulas, annotations and schedule detail are unavailable; reconstructed amounts are not represented as recovered formulas. The historical workbook and all other historical companion files remain unchanged.