House Arrest in Texas: Who Qualifies, Rules, and Costs

House arrest in Texas lets a judge keep you at home under electronic monitoring instead of in a county jail cell, either while your case is pending or after you have been sentenced. Two separate statutes authorize it. Article 17.44 of the Code of Criminal Procedure allows a magistrate to order home confinement as a condition of pretrial release on bond.¹ Article 42.035 allows a judge to let you serve all or part of a county jail sentence through an electronic monitoring program.² Either way, you wear a tracking device, follow a court-imposed schedule, and lose the program if you break the rules.

Pretrial Release vs. Serving a Sentence at Home

Which statute applies to you changes what a violation costs.

Under Article 17.44, home confinement with electronic monitoring is a bond condition. The magistrate can also order weekly drug testing as part of the same release.¹ You have not been convicted. The point is to keep you supervised while your case moves through court.

Under Article 42.035, you have been sentenced to county jail and the judge is letting you serve that sentence at home instead. The judge can order it at sentencing or later, on the court’s own motion or on your written request. The statute specifically allows the judge to confine you only during “off-work hours,” so you can keep your job during the day and serve the sentence at home the rest of the time.²

Who Qualifies

There is no automatic right to house arrest. Both statutes leave the decision to the judge, and judges weigh the seriousness of the charge, your criminal history, flight risk, and whether letting you go home would endanger anyone.

Violent offenses can disqualify you outright. In certain county volunteer electronic monitoring programs, a defendant awaiting trial for an offense involving violence, or awaiting transfer to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice after a felony conviction involving violence, is not eligible.³ Family violence cases, sexual offenses, and cases with protective orders draw heightened scrutiny, and judges in those situations often say no.

Your record matters at least as much as your current charge. Missed court dates, probation violations, and failed drug tests all cut against you. Stable employment, strong community ties, and a clean supervision history cut the other way.

What Daily Life Looks Like

House arrest does not mean you never leave home. Programs typically let you travel to and from work, attend school or vocational training, and keep medical and dental appointments. Each trip has to be arranged and approved in advance by the supervising agency, and some county programs cap your commute time — one county sets a 45-minute limit each way unless an exception is granted.⁴

Your schedule is rigid. You submit your work or school hours to the agency, and that is the schedule you follow. Any change — an extra shift, a swapped class, a rescheduled appointment — has to be documented in writing and pre-approved. The agency can call your employer, school, or doctor’s office to confirm you are where you said you would be.⁴

Emergencies are the exception to pre-approval. If you need the emergency room, you go, but you are expected to notify your supervising officer at the first chance and provide documentation afterward. A routine appointment you could have scheduled in advance does not count.

Expect additional conditions on top of the location rules: drug and alcohol testing, curfews, stay-away orders from specific people or places, and home visits from your supervision officer. Article 42.035 gives the court broad authority to attach any condition it considers reasonable.²

The Monitoring Device

Most Texas programs use either a GPS ankle monitor or a radio frequency transmitter. GPS devices track your real-time location by satellite and can be programmed with exclusion zones — a victim’s neighborhood, a school — that trigger an automatic alert if you enter them. Radio frequency systems are simpler: a transmitter on your ankle communicates with a base unit in your home and confirms you are inside during the hours you are supposed to be. RF does not track you once you leave for an approved activity, which makes it less restrictive and less common in higher-risk cases.

Both types are tamper-resistant. They detect cuts to the strap, signal shielding, and attempts to disable the hardware, and they log every entry and exit from your home.

DWI Cases and Alcohol Monitoring

DWI charges are one of the most common paths to house arrest in Texas, and they come with extra equipment. For pretrial release on a second or subsequent DWI, or a first offense with a blood alcohol concentration of .15 or higher, judges routinely require a continuous alcohol monitoring device (often called a SCRAM bracelet) in addition to GPS. The device tests perspiration for alcohol around the clock. In at least one major Texas county program, a reading of .03 or above triggers automatic revocation.⁴

Separate from any ankle device, Texas law also requires defendants charged with repeat DWI offenses or intoxication-related offenses involving serious injury to install an ignition interlock on their vehicle as a condition of pretrial release. You pay for installation and a monthly monitoring fee that cannot exceed $10. A magistrate can waive the requirement only on a finding that imposing it would not be in the best interest of justice.⁵

What It Costs

House arrest is not free. Article 42.035 lets the court require you to pay any reasonable cost of participation, including the equipment and the ongoing monitoring service.² For pretrial defendants, Article 17.44 lets the magistrate assess a reimbursement fee or order you to pay monitoring costs directly as a bond condition.¹

Amounts vary by county and by the vendor running the program. Expect a one-time setup fee plus a daily or monthly charge, and expect the total to add up over weeks or months. If a second device such as a continuous alcohol monitor is required, the expense roughly doubles.

There is one important protection on the pretrial side. Article 17.44 bars a magistrate from revoking your bond solely for failing to pay monitoring fees if the court finds you are indigent and financially unable to pay. The fees do not go away, but you cannot be jailed only because you cannot afford them.¹ After conviction, that protection is not in the statute: Article 42.035 lists failure to pay program costs as a condition whose violation can send you back to county jail.²

Does It Count as Time Served?

If you complete house arrest under Article 42.035, the time counts. The statute says you discharge the sentence “in the same manner as if the defendant were confined in county jail.”² Every day on the monitor is a day served.

The catch: you typically do not earn good-time credit on electronic monitoring the way you might in jail. It is day-for-day. If you are revoked for a violation, you get credit for the days you successfully completed on the monitor and any actual jail days, with no good-time bonus added.⁴

Pretrial house arrest is different. Time on a GPS monitor while out on bond under Article 17.44 generally does not count as credit toward a future prison sentence, because you are not yet serving a sentence. If your case later ends in a conviction with prison time, those months on the monitor usually will not shorten it.

Violations and the Separate Crime of Tampering

Common violations include missing curfew, entering an exclusion zone, failing a drug or alcohol test, missing a check-in, and leaving the house without approval. For pretrial defendants, the magistrate can revoke your bond and order your arrest for any of these, and for failing a drug test or failing to pay fees when you are not indigent.¹ Revocation means you wait for trial in county jail. For post-conviction participants, the court can pull you out of the program and send you to serve the rest of your sentence in jail; Article 42.035 lists violation of any condition, including failure to pay program costs, as grounds for revocation.²

Tampering with the device is in a category of its own. Cutting, removing, or disabling your tracking equipment is an independent crime under Texas Penal Code Section 38.112, whether you are wearing the device as part of a sentence under Article 42.035, a community supervision condition, a parole condition, or a bond condition. The baseline charge is a state jail felony, rising to a third-degree felony if you are in the super-intensive supervision program. A narrow exception allows a healthcare provider to remove or disable the device for medical necessity.⁶

The practical point: tampering creates a brand-new felony case stacked on top of the one that put you on the monitor. If the device malfunctions or becomes uncomfortable, call your monitoring agency. Do not touch it yourself.

Firearms While on House Arrest

Home confinement does not suspend federal firearms law. Under 18 U.S.C. § 922, it is illegal to possess a firearm or ammunition if you have been convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year in prison, are subject to certain domestic violence protective orders, or have been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. If you are under indictment for a felony, you are prohibited from shipping, transporting, or receiving firearms even before conviction.⁷

Texas courts also routinely include a no-firearms condition in house arrest orders. Even if your underlying charge would not trigger a federal prohibition, your bond or supervision conditions almost certainly will. A gun in the house where you are confined, even one that belongs to a family member, can be treated as a violation. If firearms are in your household, raise it with your attorney before house arrest begins.

1
State of Texas. Texas Code of Criminal Procedure CRIM P Art 17.44
2
State of Texas. Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 42.035
3
Texas Legislature Online. Texas Senate Bill 2340
4
Brazos County, Texas. Order for House Arrest and Electronic Monitoring
5
State of Texas. Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 17.441
6
Texas Public Law. Texas Penal Code Section 38.112 – Tampering with Electronic Monitoring Device
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 922 – Unlawful Acts