Buying a Home in the Little Rock Area: Little Rock, North Little Rock, Conway, Benton, Bryant, Cabot and the Towns Around Them

The rock that named the city is still on the riverbank downtown, a plain gray outcrop at the edge of the Arkansas River in Riverfront Park. A French explorer named Bernard de la Harpe wrote it down in 1722 as la petite roche, the little rock, and the name stuck to everything that grew up around it (Encyclopedia of Arkansas). A few miles upriver, a bridge built only for walkers and cyclists runs 4,226 feet over Murray Lock and Dam, and its real name is the Big Dam Bridge. It belongs to the Arkansas River Trail, 34 miles of paved path from the Clinton Presidential Park Bridge out to Pinnacle Mountain State Park (Arkansas River Trail). The trail's original 16-mile loop ties the two downtowns together across the water.

I'm Jeff Moran, NMLS #483943, a mortgage broker licensed in Arkansas through C2 Financial Corporation, and I have been in the mortgage business since 1996. I work out of Bluffton, South Carolina, and I wrote this page for anyone thinking about buying a home in Central Arkansas, the six counties around Little Rock that local institutions also call the 501, after the area code. Central Arkansas is four markets in six counties: Little Rock and North Little Rock on both banks of the Arkansas River, Conway up I-40, Benton and Bryant down I-30, and Cabot and Jacksonville up I-57 around the Air Force base. Grant and Perry counties, with Sheridan and Perryville, are the two rural counties that round out the metro. I start with the places themselves, then the base, the jobs, the roads, the schools and the hospitals. After that comes the homework on an address, the things I would want you to look up before you compare one home with another. The facts below come from public sources, cited beside the ones that matter most, and I put this page together on October 2, 2026 from research done in late September 2026.

Little Rock, North Little Rock and the places you will hear named

Downtown Little Rock, the River Market and SoMa

Downtown is where you get the river, the museums and the trail within a short walk of each other. Riverfront Park runs eleven blocks along the Arkansas River, and if you live anywhere close to it, that park and the River Trail are your front yard. If you walk the park from its east end, you start at the Clinton Presidential Center, on a campus it shares with the Clinton School of Public Service (Clinton Presidential Center). A few blocks in you reach the River Market district, where the Museum of Discovery runs its science galleries, including a Tornado Alley Theater. Past the River Market you come to the Old State House, Arkansas's first capitol, built between 1833 and 1842 and the oldest standing state capitol west of the Mississippi (Old State House Museum). South of the River Market, MacArthur Park grew up around the 1840 arsenal tower where Douglas MacArthur was born in 1880. The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts reopened there in April 2023 in a new building with galleries, an art school and a lecture hall (Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts). A home in or near the center puts all of that, and the trail, on foot or a short drive away.

SoMa is the South Main Street district. It starts where Main Street meets Interstate 630 and runs south from there (At Home in Arkansas). The city's planning commission has approved a five-story building on a South Main parking lot in the Creative Corridor, with 80 homes above 12,000 square feet of shops and restaurants (City of Little Rock, current projects). Downtown is also where the city is studying a park on top of the interstate. The 30 Crossing Park master plan puts a deck over I-30 at a cost of $93 million to $128 million, and the city published a design report in December 2025 (Arkansas Money & Politics).

The Heights, Hillcrest and I-630

Pulaski Heights, the area everyone now calls the Heights, incorporated as its own town on August 1, 1905 (Wikipedia: Pulaski Heights). It had grown from a few dozen families in the 1890s to more than 300 once electricity and the streetcar reached it. Hillcrest, next door, was Little Rock's first streetcar suburb, and its residents association uses the tagline "Heart of Little Rock" because the neighborhood is near the city's geographic center (Wikipedia: Hillcrest). If you are looking at an older home in either one, you are looking at the part of the city built in the early 1900s. Please ask the seller how old the roof is and when the plumbing, wiring and heating and air were last replaced.

I-630 is the road everyone gives directions by. It starts at I-430 and Shackleford Road as a continuation of Chenal Parkway and runs east into downtown to I-30 (Wikipedia: Interstate 630). War Memorial Park runs along it in midtown, about 117 acres holding the stadium, the Little Rock Zoo and the Dailey fitness center. Boyle Park, 243 wooded acres along Rock Creek, carries paved paths, dirt trails and mountain bike trails through its ravines.

West Little Rock and Chenal

Chenal Valley is one developer's project with a French-looking name. In the late 1980s Deltic Farm & Timber held roughly 7,000 acres near Shinall Mountain, and the company changed the spelling of the local name to make it read French (Chenal Valley POA). A special improvement bond passed in June 1986 paid for Chenal Parkway, which opened in April 1990, and Chenal Country Club and its Founders Course opened that August (Wikipedia: Chenal Valley). Chenal is governed by the Chenal Valley Property Owners Association, so a home there comes with the association's rules and its dues, and the POA's resale documents are the place to read both before you make an offer. People here shorten all of west Little Rock to WLR, and Chenal Parkway is its spine.

A new micro-hospital at 17810 Chenal Parkway was set to open in summer 2026 (Arkansas Money & Politics), so you can check whether it has opened by the time you tour. On Highway 10, which is Cantrell Road, ARDOT has been presenting a plan of about $30 million to widen 1.6 miles to six lanes between Pleasant Ridge Road and just past Taylor Loop Road (KATV). It held a public information meeting and has been answering neighborhood questions about it. Past the end of the city, Pinnacle Mountain State Park covers 2,356 acres over the Big and Little Maumelle rivers with more than 33 miles of trail. Two Rivers Park holds about 1,000 acres where the Arkansas and Little Maumelle rivers meet.

North Little Rock and Argenta

Argenta was platted in 1866 by the heirs of Thomas W. Newton Sr. The name comes from the Latin argentum, silver, for Newton's role in the Southwest Arkansas Mining Company, which worked a lead and silver mine about ten miles north (Encyclopedia of Arkansas). The city around it has changed its name three times: it incorporated as North Little Rock on July 17, 1901, became Argenta in 1906, and went back to North Little Rock in October 1917. The nickname Dogtown goes back to the 1800s, and the city now tells that story itself on its own history pages (City of North Little Rock).

Argenta is downtown North Little Rock's historic district. It is where the Arena District at Argenta has broken ground: a five-story hotel, 31,000 square feet of event space and a returning downtown Little Rock restaurant, with an 18-month build planned (KARK). Burns Park covers about 1,700 acres with roughly 15 miles of natural surface trail and 6 miles of paved path (City of North Little Rock). It also holds 27 tennis courts, six of them indoor, two 18-hole disc golf courses and a dog park. The Old Mill at T.R. Pugh Memorial Park is a 1931 re-creation of an 1880s grist mill, and it appears in the opening scene of Gone with the Wind. Down on the river, the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum floats on three barges and keeps the submarine USS Razorback alongside.

North Little Rock's population has held about level since 2020, 64,591 at the census and 64,538 in a recent estimate (Arkansas Demographics). The city also landed the Eaton plant this year. Eaton said on September 2, 2026 that it will spend more than $242 million on a plant making electrical enclosures for its Fibrebond business, with 1,200 new jobs (Arkansas Economic Development Commission).

Maumelle, Sherwood and Jacksonville

Maumelle was built on purpose. In the late 1960s a businessman named Jess P. Odom bought about 5,000 acres and formed Maumelle Land Development with roughly $45 million in HUD assistance, planning a 1,021-acre industrial park and housing at a range of prices (City of Maumelle). It was one of thirteen federal New Towns created in the early 1970s, laid out as five villages, and the first residents moved into Maumelle Club Manor in 1974 (Encyclopedia of Arkansas). It is still adding homes. The planning director reported 99 single-family permits through September 1, 2026, a 27% increase, and the same report covered about $3.6 million in federal grants for roads and greenways (Citizen Portal). Right-of-way for the Club Manor Corridor shared-use path is nearly complete.

Sherwood has a proposal in front of it to leave the Pulaski County Special School District and form its own district, which would change the school district for every home inside the proposed boundary. I cover what is decided and what is not in the schools section below. Jacksonville, next door, has Little Rock Air Force Base inside its city limits, and it gets its own section too.

Conway, Greenbrier, Vilonia and Faulkner County

Conway is now the second-largest city in Central Arkansas. Metroplan, the region's planning agency, released its 2026 Demographic Review and Outlook on September 22, 2026, and it shows Conway passing North Little Rock (KARK). The same report counts 15,300 households added across the region from 2020 to 2025, projects 15,800 more housing units by 2030, and names Faulkner and Saline as the two fastest-growing counties. The Census Bureau's 2025 estimate puts Conway at 72,328 people, up 12.7% since 2020 (Talk Business & Politics, May 2026). The Conway Area Chamber's 2024 housing study found a need for more than 900 homes over five years.

Conway owns its own utility. Conway Corporation is the city-owned electric, water, wastewater, cable, internet, telephone and home-security company. It was first franchised in 1929 for the electric light plant, then added water in 1930, wastewater in 1957 and cable in 1980 (Conway Corp). Conway Corp offered broadband by 1997, which made Conway the third city in the country to do so. So when you compare a Conway home with one twenty minutes away in Maumelle or North Little Rock, you are comparing two different utility bills from two different providers. The utilities section below says how to look each one up.

Conway is a three-college town, home to the University of Central Arkansas, Hendrix College and Central Baptist College. Toad Suck Daze, named for the old Toad Suck ferry crossing on the Arkansas River, fills downtown Conway on the first weekend of May, and in 2026 it ran May 1 to 3. The festival's proceeds fund scholarships at all three colleges plus UACCM (Toad Suck Daze). Conway Regional Health System finished a 90,000-square-foot, two-story addition on the north side of its hospital with new surgical suites and obstetrics beds, which brought it to 24 labor and delivery rooms (Cromwell). The city won $3 million from Metroplan to rebuild Salem Road from Dave Ward Drive to College Avenue with curb, gutter and better bike and pedestrian facilities (City of Conway). Cadron Settlement Park, 150 acres the city runs under a Corps of Engineers lease, has a reconstructed blockhouse and a Trail of Tears river crossing.

Greenbrier, Vilonia and Mayflower are the commuter towns for Conway and Little Rock (Encyclopedia of Arkansas). Greenbrier had 6,645 people in the 2025 estimate (501 LIFE), and Woolly Hollow State Park is just outside it, 370 acres around Lake Bennett with a lifeguarded swim beach in summer. In Mayflower, the Kenny Vernon Nature Trail runs 2.25 miles through Bell Slough with observation blinds.

Benton, Bryant and Saline County

Saline County has grown from about 80,000 residents as of 1998 to more than 131,000 (Wikipedia: Saline County). Benton is the county seat, and its 1901 Romanesque courthouse by Charles L. Thompson still stands at 200 North Main Street in the historic commercial district (Encyclopedia of Arkansas). Benton and Bryant are two separate cities with two separate school districts, about ten minutes apart on I-30. Both the city and the school district change when you cross from one to the other. So on any address you are considering, check which school district it is in before you compare it with a home in the other town. In Benton, the 1891 Old River Bridge, an iron truss over the Saline River, reopened to walkers in June 2025 after a four-phase county restoration. The Gann Museum, built in 1893 from bauxite blocks, is the only known building made of aluminum ore.

Bryant had 22,815 people in 2025 and is one of the five fastest-growing cities in Arkansas (Talk Business & Politics, May 2026). Its planning calendar is where new neighborhoods show up first: on September 3, 2026 the city's development review committee took up a 97-lot subdivision on Springhill Road along with a commercial project on Highway 5 (MySaline). ARDOT has run public involvement on widening Highway 5 from Highway 183 to the Pulaski County line, a project of about $20 million (ARDOT). Bryant also charges every water customer a monthly System Infrastructure Fee, regardless of usage, to repay the city's system bonds, and the utilities section below has the detail.

Part of Hot Springs Village is in Saline County, which puts part of the largest gated community in the United States inside this metro. The Village straddles the Garland and Saline county line, covers 26,000 acres and has more than 14,000 residents, nine golf courses, 12 lakes and about 30 miles of trails (Hot Springs Village POA). It is run by a property owners association rather than a city, and that difference gets its own section further down.

Cabot, Ward, Austin and Lonoke County

Cabot is the largest city in Lonoke County, 27,575 people in the 2024 estimate, and the city itself puts the figure at nearly 30,000 with a trade area of more than 150,000 (City of Cabot). Lonoke County passed 76,000 residents in 2024 (City of Cabot, North Lonoke County Housing Report). In June 2026 the city broke ground on the first phase of the LOCOMUT Trail along Lincoln Street from Highway 89 east toward Highway 38, planned as a piece of a future 220-mile Central Arkansas Greenway System (Arkansas Radio). Cabot's Downtown Revitalization Plan won the American Planning Association Arkansas Chapter's Block, Street & Building Award.

Cabot, Austin and Ward are the three towns you shop across up here, and new construction is active in all three, with Wolfsbridge in Cabot and Moonlight Meadows in Ward among the named communities. Ward adopted a Unified Development Ordinance in 2026, built from the Model Code for Central Arkansas' Small Cities, so if you are buying a lot or building there, that code is what the city applies (City of Ward). Out toward Scott, Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park protects the largest mound site in Arkansas, raised between about AD 700 and 1050.

Sheridan, Perryville and the two rural counties

Sheridan and Perryville are the county seats of the metro's two rural counties, Grant with 18,546 people in 2024 and Perry with 10,251 (U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2024). If you are looking in Sheridan, you are buying in a town whose economy is still heavily timber-based (Wikipedia: Sheridan). Jenkins' Ferry Battleground State Park, 40 acres in a bend of the Saline River southwest of town, marks the April 1864 battle and has picnic sites. A Perryville address puts the Ouachita National Forest close by. Harris Brake Lake, on Highway 9, is a 1,242-acre fishing lake managed by Arkansas Game and Fish. It has three concrete ramps, two gravel ramps and an accessible fishing pier, so you can launch a boat there or fish from the pier. Lake Sylvia, an 18-acre lake inside the national forest, is run by Arkansas State Parks as a unit of Pinnacle Mountain State Park, with a swim beach, bathhouses, a playground and picnic sites. Flatside Pinnacle is a 0.8-mile out-and-back trail off the Ouachita National Recreation Trail, and it climbs to a 1,550-foot rock outcrop above the Flatside Wilderness.

Little Rock Air Force Base and Herk Nation

Little Rock Air Force Base covers 6,412 acres inside Jacksonville's city limits. It is the largest C-130 base in the world and the Defense Department's primary training base for the C-130 Hercules, which is why the people there call it Herk Nation (Encyclopedia of Arkansas). The host unit is the 19th Airlift Wing, and the base reports a fiscal 2025 economic impact of $1.43 billion, with nearly 7,000 military personnel and about 1,200 civilians (Arkansas Money & Politics). On-base housing is privatized through Hunt Military Communities, about 1,000 homes in four neighborhoods, and off-base demand reaches into Jacksonville, Cabot, Sherwood, Conway and North Little Rock.

The base shows up in the loan data. In 2024, 1,321 of the metro's 9,840 home-purchase loans were VA loans, more than twice the VA count in Northwest Arkansas (FFIEC HMDA 2024). If you are buying on orders or as a veteran, how VA loans work in Arkansas covers entitlement and the funding fee.

Jobs: Eaton, the Port, Southwest Power Pool and the data centers

The Little Rock metro reached 393,800 jobs outside of farming in July 2026, up 1.3% from a year earlier and reported as a record (Talk Business & Politics). Eaton's 1,200 jobs in North Little Rock are the biggest single piece of 2026. Southwest Power Pool, the regional grid operator headquartered in Little Rock, announced a $150 million expansion in January 2026 (Arkansas Economic Development Commission). It projects about 190 new jobs by the end of 2027, roughly 165 of them in Little Rock. Welspun Tubular announced 175 new jobs with a plant expansion, and CEP USA opened its first U.S. plant in North Little Rock in May 2026 for prefabricated electrical substations.

At the Port of Little Rock, Amazon broke ground in July 2025 on an 825,000-square-foot fulfillment center planned for more than 1,000 workers (Arkansas Economic Development Commission). The building has since been closed over structural engineering issues, and Amazon filed redesign plans in July 2026 toward reopening it (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette). The city is buying nearly 500 acres to push the Port's industrial park west to the Union Pacific tracks (Arkansas Business).

Data centers are the live debate. Reporting in January 2026 placed Google behind a $1 billion, roughly 300,000-square-foot data center at the Port, likely drawing more than 100 megawatts, and Google had not formally announced it (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette). AVAIO Digital plans a $6 billion campus on 760 acres just west of Wrightsville in south Pulaski County, with 150 megawatts contracted from Entergy and more than 500 permanent jobs over five years (THV11). A third campus was approved in Conway in April 2025. Little Rock's board approved its own data center ordinance in June 2026, with water-use reporting and noise limits (Arkansas Advocate). Pulaski County's Quorum Court, the county's governing body, voted in May 2026 on a 12-month moratorium on new data center permits. Days later the County Clerk said the emergency ordinance needed 10 yes votes and received 8, so where the county stands is unsettled (Arkansas Advocate). Entergy's position is that large customers pay the full cost of the infrastructure built to serve them, and Central Arkansas Water has said its customers will not see rate increases from supplying the data centers (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 12, 2026). Those are the utilities' own statements. If you are looking at a home near the Port or around Wrightsville, ask the county and the city what has been approved nearby.

Roads: 30 Crossing, I-57 and the trail network

30 Crossing is done, in its first phase. ARDOT cut the ribbon on December 3, 2024 after about four years and $634 million: a new 10-lane bridge over the Arkansas River and new ramps and lanes at both ends. It was Arkansas's first design-build highway project (ARDOT). The next phase, rebuilding the spot where I-40 westbound meets I-30 in North Little Rock, was scheduled to start in 2026 (Arkansas Business). If you will drive that interchange daily, it is worth asking ARDOT where it stands the week you are deciding. People here say "30 Crossing" for the whole project and now for the proposed deck park too.

I-57 through Jacksonville toward Cabot. ARDOT is widening 2.5 miles of I-57, the old Highway 67-167, to six lanes between Main Street at Exit 9 and Vandenberg Boulevard at Exit 11 (THV11). The $145.2 million job also rebuilds the James Street and Gregory Street interchanges and converts the frontage roads from two-way to one-way. It has been under construction since 2023, with ramp and Vandenberg Boulevard closures through 2026 (ARDOT). A second segment, about four miles from Highway 5 north to Highway 89, was bid in October 2023 at $75 million to $100 million, and together the two jobs carry six lanes all the way from Jacksonville to Cabot. In May 2026 ARDOT broke ground on rebuilding the Highway 5 interchange in Cabot as a single point urban interchange, a design that runs all the left turns through one signal in the middle of the overpass (ARDOT).

The River Trail and the greenways. The Arkansas River Trail's 34 miles, the Big Dam Bridge and the Two Rivers Bridge, which opened in July 2011 over the Little Maumelle, are the spine. Cabot's LOCOMUT Trail is being built as a piece of a planned 220-mile Central Arkansas Greenway System, and Maumelle is building its Club Manor Corridor shared-use path. If a bike commute or an evening ride matters to you, you will want to know how far a home is from a trailhead today and what is planned near it.

Schools: buildings and boundaries, and the Sherwood question

Pulaski County has four districts: Little Rock, North Little Rock, the Pulaski County Special School District and Jacksonville North Pulaski. The other counties have their own: Conway, Greenbrier, Vilonia and Mayflower in Faulkner, Benton, Bryant and Harmony Grove in Saline, Cabot, Lonoke and England in Lonoke, Sheridan in Grant and Perryville in Perry. The district a home is in sets the school tax rate on its bill. Arkansas states that rate in mills, and a mill is one dollar of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value, so people here call the rate the millage. The school millage is usually the largest piece of an Arkansas property tax bill, and the voters of that district set it. Cabot's school millage stayed the same at the May 13, 2025 school election (Cabot Schools).

Is Sherwood getting its own school district?

Not yet, and it is not settled. A federal judge ruled in February 2026 that the Pulaski County Special School District had met its desegregation obligations, which removed the barrier that had blocked a Sherwood district for more than a decade (Arkansas Times, September 22, 2026). The proposed Sherwood School District would serve roughly 4,600 students across nine schools: Cato, Clinton, Harris, Oakbrooke, Sherwood and Sylvan Hills elementary schools, Sylvan Hills Middle School, Sylvan Hills Junior High and Sylvan Hills High School. A feasibility study commissioned by the Sherwood Public Education Foundation found the district could support itself, and it would take about 40% of PCSSD's students (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 14, 2026). The PCSSD board backed a resolution to move the split forward, and the other path is a petition of roughly 1,800 signatures. In September 2026, families at Harris Elementary in the McAlmont community wrote the board asking that Harris stay in PCSSD (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 9, 2026). Next comes review by the Arkansas State Board of Education, then possibly an election of voters inside the proposed boundary. Jacksonville did the same thing in 2016, when voters approved the Jacksonville North Pulaski School District after it split off from PCSSD, and that is the precedent Sherwood is following. If you are looking in Sherwood, the district's current attendance map is the one to check, and the boundary could change.

New buildings

PCSSD broke ground on April 27, 2026 on a new College Station Elementary to replace the current building (Arkansas Money & Politics). It is about $11.1 million and 25,000 square feet, designed for more than 200 students in pre-K through fifth grade with a gifted and talented program. The Benton School District opened Mountain View Middle School for the 2025-26 school year, its second middle school, for grades 5 through 7 and more than 600 students, off I-30 next to the Saline County Career Technical Campus (THV11). The district approved a new zoning map with it, so if you are looking in Benton, you will want the current map from the district for any address you are considering. Bryant's district runs 12 schools with about 9,775 students. In Faulkner County, Greenbrier has 3,858 students across seven schools, Vilonia 2,963 across six and Mayflower 1,015 across three.

Hospitals

Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock is in the middle of the largest expansion in its 112-year history (Polk Stanley Wilcox). It adds a new entrance with a three-story lobby, a waiting gallery connecting to a new outpatient building with clinics and surgery, and a large outdoor park. UAMS received $11 million in federal grants in November 2024, $8 million of it to convert 15,000 square feet on the seventh floor of the Freeway Medical Tower into a gastroenterology clinic and endoscopy center (Talk Business & Politics). Conway Regional's addition and the planned Chenal Parkway micro-hospital are described above, and Baptist Health, CHI St. Vincent and Saline Memorial serve the metro as well. The Arkansas Department of Health keeps the list of designated trauma centers, dated January 20, 2026, which is the document that answers where the nearest emergency care is (Arkansas Department of Health).

The homework: county, city and utility

A home's address here tells you three things to look up before you compare it with another one. The first is which county sends the tax bill, the second is which city, if any, adds its own rate and rules, and the third is which utility sends the water and sewer bill. The county's property records show the first two. The water and sewer bill is put together differently from one city to the next inside the same commute, and the list below shows how.

• Conway is served by Conway Corporation, the city-owned utility described above, for electric, water, wastewater and internet on one bill (Conway Corp).
• Little Rock wastewater rates rise every year through 2030 under a schedule the city's Board of Directors approved in October 2025. A typical residential bill at 600 cubic feet a month, about 4,500 gallons, goes from $41.73 to $59.22 by 2030, an increase of almost 42% over five years (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 21, 2025). The money pays for work at three treatment plants.
• Little Rock and North Little Rock water comes from Central Arkansas Water, whose current rate schedule applies to water billed on or after January 1, 2026 (Central Arkansas Water).
• Bryant charges every customer a monthly System Infrastructure Fee regardless of usage, under Ordinance 2025-12, to repay its system bonds, plus $0.754 per 100 gallons above 2,000 gallons a month for 2026 (City of Bryant).

On any home you are serious about, please ask the seller for the past twelve months of utility bills, all of them. They show you which provider serves the address and what the water, sewer and electric actually cost each month.

Property tax: 20%, Amendment 79 and the reset when you buy

Arkansas taxes a home on 20% of its appraised value. That 20% is called the assessed value, and the bill is the assessed value times the millage, with any credits taken off (Arkansas DFA). The millage on a given home is the school district's rate, the county's rate and the city's rate if the home is inside a city, added together. The Department of Finance and Administration publishes every county, city and school district rate in its yearly millage report, so that is the place to look up the rates for an exact address. The Pulaski County Treasurer also posts its own chart for the metro's largest county.

These are the parts of Arkansas property tax that change what you pay.

• The bill resets when you buy. Amendment 79 to the Arkansas Constitution caps how fast a home's taxable assessed value can rise after a countywide reappraisal, 5% a year for the home the owner lives in and 10% a year for other property. The cap comes off when the home changes hands, and the assessment goes to full value. So on a home that has been owned for years in Faulkner or Saline County, the metro's two fastest-growing counties, you will want to budget from the full value rather than from the current owner's bill. I explain the general idea in what happens to your property taxes after you buy.
• You have to ask for the homestead credit. Amendment 79 also provides a credit of up to $600 on the 2026 bill for the home you live in as your principal residence, raised from $425 (KTLO, January 3, 2026). It comes off after the millage is applied, and nobody files it for you. You put the homestead application on file with the county assessor, and October 15 is the deadline for the current year's bill.
• The bill arrives a year after the assessment. Real estate taxes for the prior year's assessment can be paid from March 1 through October 15, and a 10% penalty applies after October 15 (Arkansas.gov Property Tax Center). Personal property, which for most clients means vehicles, boats and trailers, has to be assessed between January 1 and May 31 each year, with a 10% late fee after that.
• Each county reappraises on its own cycle. Please ask the assessor in the county you are buying in when the last countywide reappraisal was and when the next one is due, because that date is when the Amendment 79 cap starts working for you.

Arkansas also charges a real property transfer tax, collected at the state level, and your purchase contract says whether you or the seller pays it. The Arkansas page covers that tax and the rest of the state's closing rules, including how to compare title quotes here line by line.

Insurance: the roof, the deductible and the 2023 tornado

Central Arkansas is hail and tornado country, so the homeowners insurance quote here is worth getting early, while you are still deciding between two homes. On March 31, 2023 an EF3 tornado with 165 mph winds formed west of I-430, tracked northeast through Little Rock, then crossed North Little Rock, Sherwood and Jacksonville before weakening southeast of Cabot (Wikipedia: 2023 Little Rock tornado). Nearly 600 structures in Little Rock took major damage. A year later, 288 of 588 damaged Little Rock properties had pulled repair permits (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, March 31, 2024), and the city moved in April 2026 to distribute $20 million in federal disaster recovery funds. On a home anywhere along that path, ask the seller how old the roof is and whether repair permits were pulled after the storm. The city's permit records answer the second one.

On a resale along that path, the date of the roof is worth confirming in writing. Arkansas also allows insurers to write a separate deductible for wind or hail damage to the roof, and many policies here state that deductible as a percentage of the dwelling coverage rather than a flat dollar figure. Please ask your insurance agent to spell the wind and hail deductible out in dollars for the home you are considering, because the premium and the deductible together are what you will live with. The state also passed Act 427, the Strengthen Arkansas Homes Program, which helps eligible homeowners replace a roof with a FORTIFIED roof. FORTIFIED is a standard from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety for how a roof deck is sealed and fastened down and how its edges are finished, so the roof holds up better in wind and hail. A roof only counts as FORTIFIED once a credentialed evaluator has inspected and certified it. The Arkansas Insurance Department has the program's current terms and funding. The homeowners premium is part of the monthly payment a lender qualifies you on.

Flood: Fourche Creek and the flood maps

Flooding in this metro mostly comes from creeks and flash flooding rather than from the Arkansas River itself. Fourche Creek drains a 112-square-mile watershed that holds nearly 200,000 people, and development in that watershed has made the creek prone to flash flooding (Wikipedia: Fourche Creek). The named waters are the Arkansas River, the Little Maumelle, Fourche Creek, Lake Maumelle and Lake Conway, and FEMA's maps follow them. The City of Little Rock publishes its FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Maps through the Public Works civil engineering division (City of Little Rock). The Arkansas Geological Survey publishes a set of flood-prone-area maps for the city called the Little Rock Six (Arkansas Geological Survey). You can look up any address on FEMA's Flood Map Service Center. For a home in FEMA's high-risk zone, the Special Flood Hazard Area, the lender will require flood insurance, and that premium becomes part of your monthly payment. Buying a home in a flood zone explains how to price it in before you make an offer.

Property owners associations: Chenal and the Village

A homeowners association usually covers one subdivision. Two places in this metro work at a larger scale. Chenal Valley in west Little Rock is governed by the Chenal Valley Property Owners Association, with its own governing documents (Chenal Valley POA). Hot Springs Village, partly in Saline County, is run by the Hot Springs Village Property Owners' Association, a private nonprofit established in 1970. The Village has the systems and responsibilities of a city with no tax base, so the roads, the lakes and the golf courses are paid for entirely by property owner assessments and amenity fees (Hot Springs Village POA). The POA assesses improved and unimproved lots differently, so buying the extra lot next door picks up an extra assessment.

Neither association's current figures are on this page, because the right place to read them is the association's own resale documents. Please ask for those documents early on any home in either one, since the monthly assessment is included in the payment a lender qualifies you on, right alongside taxes and insurance.

Turning these facts into your mortgage

I left the median home price off this page on purpose. The national sites that publish one disagree with each other by tens of thousands of dollars for overlapping areas and periods, so the number worth using comes from the Arkansas REALTORS Association's monthly report or the local MLS. Your agent can pull the current figure for the exact area you are considering.

The 2026 conforming and FHA loan limits for all six counties are in the box below this article. The conforming loan limit is the largest loan Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will buy in a county. The FHA limit is the largest loan FHA will insure there. All six counties carry the same figures for both. The FHA limit here is the national FHA floor, meaning the lowest FHA loan limit HUD sets anywhere in the country. Even so, it is above the price of most homes in this metro, so the limit is rarely what decides whether an FHA loan works here. The Arkansas Development Finance Authority runs the state's down payment help, including ADFA StartSmart, ADFA Move-Up and its Down Payment Assistance Program, and the current terms are on ADFA's site (ADFA). If you are buying a newly built home in Bryant, Cabot or Maumelle, buying new construction with your own lender covers what changes when the builder has a preferred lender.

Property tax at the reset value, the homeowners policy with its wind and hail deductible, flood insurance where it applies and any POA assessment are all part of the monthly payment a lender qualifies you on. So a reset tax bill on a long-held home in Saline County, a percentage wind and hail deductible along the 2023 tornado path, or a Chenal Valley assessment each changes the payment I qualify you on. That is why they are on this page. Pre-approval in Arkansas covers what the letter is based on. If you are also weighing Northwest Arkansas, the Northwest Arkansas page covers Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville the same way.

You can run your numbers for a Central Arkansas purchase whenever you are ready: rates for your scenario and Arkansas closing costs, with no credit pull and no account. Choose the option that works best for you, and the application opens from there.

Nothing here is a loan approval, a denial or a commitment to lend, and it is not tax advice. The value applied to a specific parcel and the credits on it are set by that county's assessor, so they are worth confirming with the county office.

Common questions

Is Conway bigger than North Little Rock?

Yes, by Metroplan's count. The region's planning agency released its 2026 Demographic Review and Outlook on September 22, 2026, and it names Conway the second-largest city in Central Arkansas, behind Little Rock and ahead of North Little Rock. The Census Bureau's 2025 estimate put Conway at 72,328 people, up 12.7% since 2020, while North Little Rock has held about level since the 2020 census.

Is Sherwood getting its own school district?

Not yet. A February 2026 federal ruling cleared the way, a feasibility study found a Sherwood district of about 4,600 students in nine schools could support itself, and the PCSSD board backed a resolution to move it forward. The Arkansas State Board of Education still has to review it, and an election of voters inside the proposed boundary may follow. Families at Harris Elementary have asked that their school stay in PCSSD, so the boundary itself is not final.

Will my Arkansas property tax bill match the seller's?

Usually not. Amendment 79 caps how fast a home's taxable assessed value can rise while the same owner holds it, and that cap comes off when the home changes hands. The county assessor then assesses the home at 20% of its full appraised value. A home that has been owned for years in a county where values have climbed can carry a bill well below what the next owner pays.

Who is the electric company in Conway, Arkansas?

Conway Corporation, which the city owns. It supplies electric, water, wastewater, cable, internet, telephone and home security on one system, and it has been the city's electric utility since 1929. Little Rock and North Little Rock get water from Central Arkansas Water instead, and each city runs its own wastewater utility.

Is the I-30 construction in Little Rock finished?

The first phase is. ARDOT cut the ribbon on 30 Crossing on December 3, 2024, with a new 10-lane bridge over the Arkansas River and new ramps and lanes at both interchanges. A second phase, rebuilding where I-40 westbound meets I-30 in North Little Rock, was scheduled to start in 2026, and the city is separately studying a deck park over I-30 downtown.

Which towns are closest to Little Rock Air Force Base?

The base is inside Jacksonville's city limits, and on-base housing runs about 1,000 homes in four neighborhoods through Hunt Military Communities. Off-base demand reaches into Jacksonville, Cabot, Sherwood, Conway and North Little Rock, and the I-57 widening between Jacksonville and Cabot is the road project that changes that commute.

Does Chenal Valley have an HOA?

Chenal Valley is governed by the Chenal Valley Property Owners Association, a POA rather than a single-subdivision HOA. Its rules and its dues come with a home there, and the association's resale documents are where the current figures are listed, so you will want them in hand before you make an offer.

Do I need flood insurance in Little Rock?

It depends on the FEMA flood zone the home is in. Flooding here mostly comes from creeks such as Fourche Creek rather than from the Arkansas River, and the city publishes its FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Maps. If the home is in the Special Flood Hazard Area, the lender will require flood insurance and the premium becomes part of your monthly payment.