The State of Housing
in Texas

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Introduction

Texas is the place people move to. In a single year between July 2023 and July 2024, the state added 562,941 residents - the largest numeric gain of any state in the country, and the second year running that Texas led the nation. Harris County alone, home to Houston, added more than 105,000 people, the largest county gain anywhere in the United States. - U.S. Census Bureau via KXAN

The conventional story about Texas housing is that it works. Land is cheap, regulation is light, and builders build. Texas has led the nation in housing permits since 2008. And there is truth in that story: the state has a deep apartment stock, a fast permitting pipeline, and home prices that, on paper, sit below the national median.

Then you look at the data underneath.

Texas builds more homes than any other state and is still short hundreds of thousands of them. Rents in its major metros rose 35 to 57 percent in six years. Eviction filings in the four largest metros have surged past pre-pandemic levels, with one Texas county filing an eviction against roughly one in every ten renter households in a single year. Along the southern border, hundreds of thousands of people live in settlements that lack running water, sewage, or paved roads. In the oil patch of West Texas, workers earning six figures sleep in dormitory "man camps" and pay 800 dollars a month for a patch of gravel to park an RV. On the Gulf Coast, the cost of insuring a home has become its own affordability crisis. And in the state's two flagship cities, Houston and Austin, two opposite responses to homelessness - one a coordinated housing-first system, the other a voter-reinstated camping ban - have produced two very different outcomes.

This report consolidates original research across fifteen Texas housing markets, organized around the forces that actually drive housing pressure in this state: explosive metro growth, the border colonias, the Permian Basin oil cycle, Gulf Coast disaster risk, military posts, and university towns. Every statistic is sourced to a specific federal dataset, government report, or verified news article, with the source linked inline. Federal housing figures - HUD Fair Market Rents, NLIHC housing wages and shortage data, and Census American Community Survey estimates - were retrieved and cross-validated against their primary sources in June 2026.

Two questions frame the analysis. First: have housing costs outrun wages in Texas? Second: is trust - the ability to know that a listing is real, a landlord is legitimate, and a roommate is who they say they are - a missing piece of how Texans find housing? The data answers both, and it does not answer them the way the cheap-and-easy narrative would predict.

The data speaks for itself.

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Texas: The Big Picture

Before examining individual markets, the statewide numbers frame the scale.

Population and Growth

Note on population sources: the 29.6 million figure is the ACS 2019-2023 5-year period estimate; the 29.1 million figure is the 2020 Decennial count; the +562,941 one-year gain is from the Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program (PEP). These are three distinct Census products and are labeled as such throughout this report.

Housing Supply

Texas builds more homes than any state in the country and is still short of demand. Up For Growth's analysis put the 2023 shortfall at roughly 306,000 homes; the prior report year's figure was about 320,000. The state's problem is not that it does not build - it is that population, concentrated in a handful of booming metros, has consistently outpaced even an aggressive construction pipeline, and that pipeline is now shrinking. - Texas Tribune

Wages vs. Housing Costs

Texas has no state minimum wage above the federal $7.25 per hour, and state law preempts cities from setting their own. A Texan earning the minimum wage would need to work 164 hours in a week - more than four full-time jobs - to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment at the statewide Fair Market Rent. There are only 168 hours in a week. - NLIHC Out of Reach 2025

Cost-Burdened Renters and the Affordability Gap

More than half of all Texas renters are cost-burdened, and nearly one in four spends more than half their income on rent. For the state's poorest renters - extremely low income households, earning at or below the poverty line or 30 percent of area median income - there are just 26 affordable and available homes for every 100 households that need one, a shortage of roughly 709,000 units. - NLIHC The Gap 2026

Attribution note: The Gap figures above are from NLIHC's 2026 edition (released March 2026, built on 2024 ACS data), which is the edition currently live. The prior 2025 edition reported 25 affordable and available homes per 100 ELI renters for Texas. The two editions are labeled distinctly so neither is mis-cited.

The Property Tax Wedge

Texas has no state income tax. It funds schools, counties, and local services largely through property taxes, which are among the highest in the nation and the highest of any state without an income tax. That structural choice flows directly into housing costs: it raises the carrying cost of ownership and, through landlords passing taxes through, it raises rents. Texas homeowners pay a median property tax bill nearly 900 dollars above the national median despite owning homes valued below the national median. - CultureMap Houston / Construction Coverage

No Rent Control, Few Tenant Protections

Texas Local Government Code Section 214.902 preempts municipal rent control statewide. Cities and counties may not cap rent increases except during a declared disaster-related housing emergency tied to the governor's state-of-disaster process. - Texas Local Government Code 214.902

In 2023, the Legislature went further, barring cities from enacting additional tenant protections; local rules in Austin and Dallas that had given tenants more time to pay overdue rent before a formal eviction ended when the new state law took effect September 1, 2023. - Texas Tribune

The result shows up in the eviction data. Landlords filed more than 177,000 eviction cases across the Houston, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth areas in 2023, according to Princeton's Eviction Lab. Dallas County landlords filed just under 50,000 evictions in 2024, the most in any year on record. In Harris County, more than 76,000 cases were filed in a single year - roughly one for every ten renter households. - Texas Tribune, Houston Public Media

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The Big Metros

Five metropolitan areas - Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio - hold most of Texas's population and almost all of its growth. They share one pattern: demand arrived faster than supply, and Fair Market Rents climbed 35 to 48 percent in six years even though Texas builds more housing than any state. These are not vacancy-paradox markets like Colorado's ski towns. They are the raw arithmetic of population growth outrunning the homebuilder.

A note on the FY2026 figures below: HUD's FY2026 Fair Market Rents fell year-over-year in several of these metros (Austin, San Antonio, Midland, Odessa), reflecting a post-2024 softening as a record wave of apartment deliveries was absorbed. The six-year trend remains sharply upward in every market.

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Austin

County: Travis - population 1,307,625 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Austin-Round Rock, TX MSA (renamed Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX MSA in FY2026); 5-county areawide Total Housing Units (Travis): 594,638 | Occupied: 561,491 (94.4%) | Vacant: 33,147 (5.6%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households (Travis): 263,736 (47.0% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent (Travis): $1,669 | Median Household Income: $97,169 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: The state's tech hub and capital; the fastest-rent-growth big metro of the 2020s.

Austin is the clearest test of the costs-up-wages-flat hypothesis in Texas. It carries the highest housing wage of any metro in the state, and a renter share - 47 percent of Travis County households - that rivals the coastal cities.

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +36.6% ($1,356 to $1,852)
• The FY2026 decline reflects Austin's historic apartment-delivery wave. A surge of new construction measurably drove rents down - one of the few places in the country where supply visibly moved the price. - Pew Charitable Trusts

Wages vs. Housing

At Austin's housing wage of $37.48 per hour, a minimum-wage worker would need to work 207 hours in a week to afford a two-bedroom - a physical impossibility, since a week contains 168 hours. Up For Growth estimated the Austin metro was short more than 23,000 housing units in 2022. - Texas Tribune

Homelessness and the Camping Ban

Austin has become the national reference point for the enforcement approach to homelessness. In May 2021, voters approved Proposition B, reinstating a criminal ban on public camping, sitting, or lying down. - KVUE

Austin pairs the camping ban with the HEAL initiative, which moves people from encampments into purchased motels and shelter. The contrast with Houston's coordinated housing-first model, 165 miles east, is one of the defining stories in this report.

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Dallas

County: Dallas - population 2,603,816 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Dallas, TX HUD Metro FMR Area (HMFA) - a designated Small Area FMR metro (ZIP-level payment standards) Total Housing Units (Dallas County): 1,053,471 | Occupied: 971,690 (92.2%) | Vacant: 81,781 (7.8%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 478,237 (49.2% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,469 | Median Household Income: $74,149 - ACS 2019-2023

Dallas was the first metro in the country to use Small Area Fair Market Rents - ZIP-code-level payment standards - under a 2010 court settlement, and it remains one of only two Texas metros (with Fort Worth-Arlington) where SAFMR use is mandatory. The areawide 2BR figures below are the metro base; actual voucher payment standards vary materially by ZIP code.

Rent Data (2BR FMR, areawide)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +47.0% ($1,314 to $1,931)

Key Data

Half of all Dallas County renters are cost-burdened, and the county set an all-time eviction record in 2024 - the year after the state stripped cities of the authority to extend tenants' time to cure overdue rent.

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Fort Worth

County: Tarrant - population 2,135,743 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Fort Worth-Arlington, TX HMFA - a designated Small Area FMR metro Total Housing Units (Tarrant): 827,874 | Occupied: 769,285 (92.9%) | Vacant: 58,589 (7.1%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 312,653 (40.6% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,447 | Median Household Income: $81,905 - ACS 2019-2023

Rent Data (2BR FMR, areawide)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +47.9% ($1,165 to $1,723) - the second-highest six-year increase of the fifteen markets studied.

Key Data

Fort Worth posts the highest renter cost-burden rate of the five big metros: 54.3 percent of its renters pay more than 30 percent of income on housing. Its six-year Fair Market Rent increase, 47.9 percent, is second only to the military market of Killeen-Temple.

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Houston

County: Harris - population 4,758,579 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX HMFA; 7-county areawide Total Housing Units (Harris): 1,884,607 | Occupied: 1,728,103 (91.7%) | Vacant: 156,504 (8.3%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 781,714 (45.2% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,349 | Median Household Income: $73,104 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: The nation's most-cited housing-first success story - and its most-cited rental-scam hotspot.

Houston is the largest housing market in Texas and the most instructive. It is where the supply problem, the eviction surge, the scam problem, and the most successful homelessness response in the country all coexist.

Rent Data (2BR FMR, areawide)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +43.5% ($1,096 to $1,573)

Key Data

The Way Home: Housing First That Worked

Houston built what is widely regarded as the most effective homelessness-reduction system in the country. In 2012, more than 100 organizations and government entities aligned under a single coordinated system called The Way Home, led by the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County, and committed to a housing-first strategy.

The lesson of The Way Home is not only housing-first policy - it is coordination and trust. Dozens of organizations agreed to operate as one system with shared data and a common intake, rather than competing for the same clients and funding. The model is now being exported to Dallas, New Orleans, and Oklahoma City. - CNN

The Scam Problem

Houston is also the epicenter of Texas rental fraud. The Texas Real Estate Commission's enforcement division has warned repeatedly about a concentration of leasing scams in the greater Houston area. In the words of its enforcement division director, Michael Molloy, these scams are "deceiving landlords, tenants, and even our license holders into fraudulent lease agreements." - The Real Deal

One Houston renter lost $1,500 to a Facebook Marketplace listing that copied a real home's photos and offered a one-bedroom for $650 a month; the supposed landlord, "out of town," took a PayPal deposit and vanished. - KHOU

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San Antonio

County: Bexar - population 2,037,344 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX HMFA Total Housing Units (Bexar): 807,160 | Occupied: 740,402 (91.7%) | Vacant: 66,758 (8.3%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 302,765 (40.9% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,290 | Median Household Income: $70,571 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: A major military market - Joint Base San Antonio - layered onto a fast-growing metro.

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +35.7% ($1,051 to $1,426)

Key Data

San Antonio is the most affordable of the big five on paper - the lowest housing wage and lowest median rent - yet still leaves more than half its renters cost-burdened. It is also home to Joint Base San Antonio, one of the largest military concentrations in the country, where the gap between the Basic Allowance for Housing and market rent shapes where thousands of service members can live.

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Big Metros at a Glance

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The Border and the Rio Grande Valley

If the big metros are the story of growth outrunning supply, the border is the story of a different and harder problem: housing that is cheap by the numbers and still unaffordable, alongside settlements where the housing itself fails the most basic standards of habitability.

The Rio Grande Valley and the broader border region carry the lowest housing wages in Texas - rent here is a fraction of Austin's. But incomes are lower still. Median household income in Hidalgo and Cameron counties sits near $51,000 to $52,000, well below the state's $76,292, and roughly half of renters are cost-burdened anyway. The defining feature of this region is the colonia: unincorporated settlements, hundreds of them, where families bought lots from developers and built homes that often lack running water, sewage connections, or paved roads.

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El Paso

County: El Paso - population 866,275 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: El Paso, TX HMFA Total Housing Units: 320,812 | Occupied: 296,341 (92.4%) | Vacant: 24,471 (7.6%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 107,636 (36.3% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,045 | Median Household Income: $58,859 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: Border metro and home to Fort Bliss, one of the Army's largest installations.

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +44.0% ($827 to $1,191). After three nearly flat years, El Paso's FMR jumped more than 16 percent two years running.

Key Data

El Paso shows the border pattern in miniature: a low housing wage, a median rent near $1,045, and yet 52.3 percent of renters cost-burdened because incomes are lower still. El Paso is also one of the six Texas counties with the largest colonia populations.

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McAllen

County: Hidalgo - population 880,921 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX MSA Total Housing Units: 302,173 | Occupied: 264,128 (87.4%) | Vacant: 38,045 (12.6%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 85,653 (32.4% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $925 | Median Household Income: $52,281 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: The heart of colonia settlement in the United States; more than 40% of all Texas colonias are in Hidalgo County.

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +42.7% ($743 to $1,060)

Key Data

Hidalgo County has the lowest median rent of any market in this report - $925 - and yet nearly half its renters are cost-burdened and 27.7 percent are severely cost-burdened, because median household income is just $52,281. Cheap rent is not the same as affordable housing. Overcrowding runs at 11.6 percent, almost two and a half times the statewide rate. Hidalgo's chief administrative officer for health and human services, Eduardo Olivarez, has called substandard housing in the county's unincorporated areas the single biggest impediment to public health, describing rescue crews pulling families from homes "made of pallets and a tarp" during severe storms. - Rio Grande Guardian

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Brownsville

County: Cameron - population 423,192 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Brownsville-Harlingen, TX MSA Total Housing Units: 157,565 | Occupied: 135,435 (86.0%) | Vacant: 22,130 (14.0%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 47,081 (34.8% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $899 - the lowest of any market studied | Median Household Income: $51,334 - ACS 2019-2023

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +37.8% ($760 to $1,047)

Key Data

Brownsville-Harlingen has the lowest housing wage and lowest median rent of any market in this report. It is the strongest single counter-example to the idea that low rents solve affordability: at a median rent of $899 against a median income of $51,334, just over half of Cameron County renters are still cost-burdened. Cameron is home to Cameron Park, one of the largest and most-studied colonias in the country.

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Laredo

County: Webb - population 267,731 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Laredo, TX MSA Total Housing Units: 86,727 | Occupied: 79,572 (91.7%) | Vacant: 7,155 (8.3%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 28,731 (36.1% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $997 | Median Household Income: $62,506 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: The nation's largest inland port; a trade-driven border economy.

Key Data

Webb County posts the second-highest severe cost-burden rate among the border markets and overcrowding at twice the state rate. Like its neighbors, its affordability problem is an income problem, not a rent problem.

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The Colonias

Across the Texas-Mexico border, the colonias are the most acute housing-quality failure in the state. They are not captured by any single metro's Fair Market Rent; they are a parallel housing system.

Important attribution note: the Census Bureau does not delineate "colonias" as a geography. The overcrowding and plumbing percentages cited per border county above (Hidalgo, Cameron, Webb, El Paso) are county-wide ACS aggregates, not colonia-specific figures. They are presented as the county-level signal of the housing stress that colonias concentrate, never as colonia-specific measurements.

The colonias were created by developers who sold lots, often in remote or flood-prone areas, to families seeking affordable land, frequently without water, sewer, or road infrastructure. Many homes still cannot pass the inspections required to connect to municipal water lines, and residents cannot afford the repairs that would let them qualify. - Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, Dallas Fed

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The Permian Basin

In West Texas, housing follows the price of oil. The Permian Basin - centered on Midland and Odessa - has the most volatile housing market in the state, and one of the strangest: a place where unskilled laborers can earn six figures and still have nowhere to live, where the solution has been to build dormitory "man camps" and rent gravel pads for RVs.

The volatility shows up directly in the Fair Market Rent series. Both Midland and Odessa posted a year-over-year FMR decline in FY2023, during an oil downturn, then jumped more than 20 percent in FY2024 as activity rebounded. Two of those single-year jumps exceed the threshold at which federal rent data is normally flagged for review, and they reflect a combination of HUD's adoption of a private-sector rent index and genuine oil-cycle swings, not a data error.

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Midland

County: Midland - population 171,496 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Midland, TX HMFA Total Housing Units: 71,565 | Occupied: 67,057 (93.7%) | Vacant: 4,508 (6.3%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 21,322 (31.8% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,383 | Median Household Income: $93,984 - the second-highest of the fifteen counties - ACS 2019-2023

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +31.9% ($1,349 to $1,780), but along a far more volatile path than any metro.

Key Data

Midland's housing wage of $35.90 - third highest of the fifteen markets in this report - is higher than Houston's or San Antonio's, in a county of 171,000 people, because oil-driven demand bids up rent against a thin housing stock. The mayor has described losing traffic engineers, water-utility workers, and parks staff because the city cannot house them. - Texas Tribune

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Odessa

County: Ector - population 163,206 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Odessa, TX MSA Total Housing Units: 67,542 | Occupied: 62,422 (92.4%) | Vacant: 5,120 (7.6%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 22,205 (35.6% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,284 | Median Household Income: $71,031 - ACS 2019-2023

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +37.0% ($1,164 to $1,595). The FY2024 jump of 22.9 percent is the single largest one-year FMR move of the fifteen markets.

Key Data

Man Camps and the RV Solution

When a Permian boom hits, the workforce can triple in months while houses cannot be built that fast. The improvised answer is temporary worker housing - "man camps" - and RV pads.

The Permian is the clearest place in Texas where the hypothesis that costs outrun wages gets complicated. Here wages spiked with the commodity - but housing spiked harder and faster, and the volatility itself is the burden. A worker who signs a lease at the top of a boom can be underwater when the rig count falls.

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The Coast

On the Texas Gulf Coast, the housing-cost story has an additional line item that does not appear in the rent tables: insurance. As private insurers have retreated from the coast, homeowners have become increasingly dependent on the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, the state's insurer of last resort, and on the federal flood program. Premiums have become a housing cost in their own right.

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Corpus Christi

County: Nueces - population 352,829 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Corpus Christi, TX (HMFA in FY2026) Total Housing Units: 153,109 | Occupied: 130,770 (85.4%) | Vacant: 22,339 (14.6%) - the highest vacancy of the fifteen counties - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 52,467 (40.1% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,224 | Median Household Income: $66,021 - ACS 2019-2023

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +36.7% ($999 to $1,366)

Key Data

Insurance as a Housing Cost

In 2024, the TWIA board approved a 10 percent rate increase on coastal homeowners as the region recovered from Hurricane Beryl. Corpus Christi state representative Todd Hunter rallied opposition, and Texas Insurance Commissioner Cassie Brown ultimately rejected the increase, writing that it "would be unjust and unfair because of the hardships it would impose on the coast." - KSAT

Corpus Christi also has the highest vacancy rate of the fifteen counties studied, 14.6 percent, reflecting the coastal mix of seasonal and second-home properties layered onto a working port city.

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College Towns and Military Posts

Two final market types round out the Texas picture. University towns concentrate student renters and post the highest cost-burden rates in the state. Military posts create markets where what a household can pay is set not by local wages but by the Basic Allowance for Housing - and where the gap between that allowance and market rent decides where service members can live.

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College Station-Bryan

County: Brazos - population 237,980 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: College Station-Bryan, TX MSA Total Housing Units: 99,118 | Occupied: 88,415 (89.2%) | Vacant: 10,703 (10.8%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 47,043 (53.2% of occupied) - the highest renter share of the fifteen counties - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,160 | Median Household Income: $58,388 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: Home to Texas A&M University; a majority-renter county.

Key Data

Brazos County posts the highest renter cost-burden in the state - 60.2 percent paying more than 30 percent of income on rent, and 34.8 percent paying more than half. The driver is the student-renter population of Texas A&M: students with little or no recorded income concentrate the burden statistics. It is a real signal of a thin, expensive student-rental market, but it should be read with the student context in mind, not as a pure workforce-affordability number.

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Lubbock

County: Lubbock - population 314,633 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Lubbock, TX HMFA Total Housing Units: 136,468 | Occupied: 124,045 (90.9%) | Vacant: 12,423 (9.1%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 55,454 (44.7% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,134 | Median Household Income: $63,367 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: Home to Texas Tech University; an agricultural-region hub.

Key Data

Like College Station, Lubbock's cost-burden numbers are elevated by a large student-renter population at Texas Tech. The same caveat applies, and the same underlying truth holds: more than half of Lubbock renters spend more than 30 percent of income on housing.

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Killeen and Fort Cavazos

County: Bell - population 379,811 (ACS 2019-2023) - ACS 2019-2023 DP05 FMR Area: Killeen-Temple, TX HMFA Total Housing Units: 151,858 | Occupied: 138,557 (91.2%) | Vacant: 13,301 (8.8%) - ACS 2019-2023 DP04 Renter Households: 60,749 (43.8% of occupied) - ACS 2019-2023 B25003 Median Gross Rent: $1,168 | Median Household Income: $66,051 - ACS 2019-2023 Defining feature: Home to Fort Cavazos (formerly and, per Army plans, again Fort Hood), one of the largest active-duty Army posts in the country.

Rent Data (2BR FMR)

• Cumulative change FY2020-FY2026: +57.1% ($785 to $1,233) - the largest six-year Fair Market Rent increase of any market in this report.

Key Data

Killeen-Temple has seen the sharpest Fair Market Rent growth in the state - up 57 percent in six years - which directly squeezes the soldiers stationed at Fort Cavazos. The Military Officers Association of America illustrated the gap with a concrete case: a married sergeant with two children drawing $1,401 a month in housing allowance, after the Defense Department's own utility set-aside, has about $1,135 for rent - enough to cover just 34 of 277 three-bedroom listings in the area. Fort Cavazos has had to run a Military Value Program of discounted hotels and corporate apartments to house incoming families who cannot find a permanent home. - MOAA, DVIDS

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At a Glance

Fair Market Rent and Housing Wages (all fifteen markets)

Housing wages are NLIHC Out of Reach 2025 (which uses HUD FY2025 Fair Market Rents). Hours/week are at the Texas minimum wage of $7.25. The statewide 2BR FMR shown ($1,542) is NLIHC's population-weighted FY2025 figure; the market rows show HUD's FY2026 areawide 2BR FMR.

Who Lives Here: Demographics and Renter Households (ACS 2019-2023)

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2019-2023 5-Year Estimates. Tables DP05, DP04, B25003, B25064, B19013, and B25070. All county figures are ACS 5-year period estimates.

Key takeaway: Across these fifteen counties there are roughly 2.67 million renter households. In every single one of them, at least 47 percent of renters are cost-burdened, and in twelve of the fifteen the figure is above half. This is not a problem of one expensive metro. It is the same problem - rent consuming more than 30 percent of income - reproduced from the tech corridor of Austin to the colonias of the Rio Grande Valley to the oil patch of the Permian Basin.

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Seven Themes Across the Data

Across fifteen markets and four distinct economic geographies, seven patterns surface from the Texas data. They are not the same themes that emerged in Colorado. Texas has almost no ski-town vacancy paradox; it has growth, energy, the border, the coast, and a tax-and-regulation structure all its own.

1. Growth Outran the Homebuilder

Texas builds more housing than any state and is still short. The state added 562,941 people in a single year, Harris County alone added 105,000, and Up For Growth still measured a roughly 306,000-unit shortfall. Fair Market Rents rose 35 to 48 percent in six years across the big metros. The constraint is not the absence of construction - it is that demand, concentrated in a few booming metros, ran ahead of even an aggressive pipeline that is now slowing. - Census via KXAN, Up For Growth via Texas Tribune

2. Cheap Rent Is Not Affordable Housing

The border markets have the lowest rents in the state and some of the worst affordability. Brownsville's housing wage of $18.23 is the lowest of the fifteen markets, its median rent of $899 the lowest - and yet 50.1 percent of its renters are cost-burdened and 25 percent severely so, because the median household income is $51,334. McAllen tells the same story at 49.5 percent cost-burdened. Affordability is a ratio, not a price, and on the border the income side of the ratio is what fails. - NLIHC Out of Reach 2025, ACS 2019-2023 B25070

3. The Colonia Gap

Hundreds of thousands of Texans live in border settlements that lack running water, sewage, or paved roads. More than 1,800 colonias span 29 border counties; the six largest-population border counties alone hold 1,854 colonias and 369,482 residents. County-level data shows the stress: overcrowding in Hidalgo runs at 11.6 percent, more than double the state rate, and roughly half of rural colonia homes have incomplete plumbing. This is a housing-quality failure with no parallel in the rest of the state. - Texas Secretary of State, TDHCA

4. The Permian Whipsaw

In Midland and Odessa, housing tracks the oil cycle. Both posted Fair Market Rent declines in FY2023, then jumps above 20 percent in FY2024. Midland's housing wage of $35.90 exceeds Houston's, in a county one-twenty-eighth Harris County's size. The signature response - dormitory man camps and $700-to-$800 RV pads - exists because a boom can triple the workforce faster than any builder can pour foundations. The burden here is volatility as much as level. - HUD FMR via RentData.org, Marketplace

5. Insurance Is a Housing Cost

On the Gulf Coast, the price of staying insured rivals the price of rent or mortgage. Texas home-insurance premiums rose roughly 21 percent in 2023 and about 19 percent in 2024, the fastest growth of any state, to an average of $4,585 - more than double the national average. After Hurricane Beryl drove 25,000 TWIA claims, the windstorm pool approved a 10 percent coastal rate hike that the state insurance commissioner rejected as unaffordable. A rent table cannot see this cost, but a coastal household feels it every month. - Newsweek, KSAT

6. Two Cities, Two Answers on Homelessness

Houston and Austin chose opposite responses, and the data diverged. Houston's coordinated, housing-first system, The Way Home, cut homelessness about 63 percent and placed more than 30,000 people into permanent housing since 2012, while spending the least per capita of any major U.S. city - its core innovation being that dozens of agencies agreed to operate as one trusted system. Austin reinstated a criminal camping ban by ballot in 2021 and issued roughly 1,200 citations and arrests, while its estimated homeless count stayed above 5,000 and Travis County evictions hit a record 13,210 in 2024. - CBS News, Austin Monitor

7. No Rent Control, Few Protections, Rising Evictions

Texas preempts local rent control by statute and, in 2023, barred cities from extending tenant protections. The result is one of the most landlord-favorable legal environments in the country - and a surge in evictions: more than 177,000 filings across the four biggest metros in 2023, a record ~50,000 in Dallas County in 2024, and roughly one eviction filing for every ten renter households in Harris County. Property taxes, the highest of any no-income-tax state, push through into rents on top of it all. - Texas Local Government Code 214.902, Texas Tribune

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The Hidden Problem

The data above documents the cost of housing in Texas. But sitting underneath the cost is a second problem that the rent tables do not capture: even when housing exists and is nominally affordable, Texans struggle to find it safely, because the channels they use to search are unverified and increasingly fraudulent.

The Trust Gap

Texas, and Houston in particular, is one of the country's worst rental-fraud hotspots. The Texas Real Estate Commission has issued repeated public warnings about a concentration of leasing scams in the greater Houston area, with its enforcement division reporting a multi-year increase in fraudulent lease agreements that, in director Michael Molloy's words, deceive "landlords, tenants, and even our license holders." - The Real Deal

The Better Business Bureau says the same. Jason Meza, a BBB regional director, told KXAN that rental fraud is "prevalent" in fast-growth markets like Austin, where so many newcomers are searching at once: "It should be on the top of every mind for everyone looking for a rental right now." - KXAN

What Houston Proved

The most successful housing intervention in Texas - Houston's reduction of homelessness by roughly 63 percent - did not turn primarily on building. It turned on coordination and trust: more than 100 organizations agreeing to act as a single system with shared data and a common front door, instead of a fragmented set of programs each pursuing its own intake. That is the same idea, scaled to a public system, that individual renters and landlords need at the level of a single lease: a way to know the listing is real, the landlord is legitimate, and the counterparty is who they claim to be. - Smart Cities Dive

The Demand Signal

When affordable, verified housing does become available in Texas, demand is overwhelming - and the search channels people actually use are not built to meet it safely. At Fort Cavazos, a sergeant's housing allowance covered just 34 of 277 listings, and the listings he could reach were scattered across Zillow, Apartments.com, and military-focused sites with no shared verification. In the colonias, families who could pass an inspection cannot afford the repairs to qualify, so the homes never enter any trusted market at all. In much of Texas the demand exists, the supply in many cases exists too, and what is missing is the trusted infrastructure to connect the two. The supply problem and the trust problem compound each other. - MOAA

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Why This Matters

The data across these fifteen Texas markets points to a clear and specific conclusion. Texas does not have Colorado's problem. It is not a state where empty second homes outnumber workers two to one. It is a state where growth, geography, and policy have produced a different crisis - and where the costs-up, wages-flat pattern still holds in its own form.

Costs went up. Wages mostly did not. Fair Market Rents climbed 35 to 57 percent in six years across these markets. The Texas minimum wage is the federal floor of $7.25 and has not moved. At that wage it takes 164 hours a week - more than four full-time jobs - to afford the statewide two-bedroom Fair Market Rent, and 207 hours in Austin, a figure that exceeds the number of hours in a week. The hypothesis holds. - NLIHC Out of Reach 2025

But the Texas story is not only about price. On the border, rents are among the lowest in America and housing is still unaffordable because incomes are lower; the binding problem is income and housing quality, not rent. In the Permian, wages spiked with oil but housing spiked harder and the volatility is the burden. On the coast, insurance is the hidden line item. In the university towns, students concentrate the cost burden. Each geography refines the national pattern rather than simply repeating it.

Trust is the missing infrastructure here too. Texas is one of the worst rental-fraud markets in the country, concentrated in its largest city. The state's most successful housing intervention, Houston's housing-first system, worked precisely because it replaced a fragmented, low-trust set of programs with one coordinated, verified system. The lesson scales down to the individual lease.

That is why Rookd exists - not to build the 306,000 homes Texas is short, which requires policy, capital, and construction, but to be a trust layer over the housing that already exists and the housing being built. A way to verify that a listing is real, a landlord is legitimate, and the person you are about to share a home with is who they say they are.

Tied to each of these Texas markets, that trust layer looks specific:

• In Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston: verified listings and verified counterparties in the highest-fraud, fastest-growth markets in the state, where newcomers are searching by the hundred-thousand and scams follow the demand.
• On the border, in El Paso, McAllen, Brownsville, and Laredo: verified-tenant access that does not depend on a thick credit file, for renters whose affordability problem is income, not willingness to pay.
• In the Permian Basin: rapid, verified worker housing during boom phases, so a temporary surge does not have to mean a man camp or an $800 RV pad found through an unverified ad.
• In military markets like Killeen, El Paso, and San Antonio: BAH-eligible verified housing for service members and families arriving on short notice, who today must stitch together listings across half a dozen unverified platforms.
• In the university towns of College Station and Lubbock: portable, verified rental history for students who move every year and start each search as a stranger to every landlord.

Because in a state this big, this fast, and this fraud-prone, trust is not a nicety. It is the infrastructure that makes the housing that exists reachable by the people who need it.

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Methodology and Notes

Data Sources

This report draws on four primary categories of data:

1. Federal housing cost data (HUD): Fair Market Rents by fiscal year, retrieved from HUD's FY2026 areawide data file and the HUD FMR datasets portal, with FY2020-FY2025 values from RentData.org (a HUD aggregator) and cross-validated against HUD's own FY2025 spreadsheet. All 105 area-year cells (15 markets x 7 years) were confirmed against a live source.
2. National Low Income Housing Coalition: Housing wages, hours-per-week-at-minimum-wage figures, and renter counts from Out of Reach 2025; extremely-low-income shortage and cost-burden data from The Gap 2026.
3. U.S. Census Bureau: Population, housing units, vacancy, tenure, median rent, median income, cost burden, overcrowding, and plumbing data from the American Community Survey 2019-2023 5-Year Estimates (tables DP05, DP04, B25003, B25064, B19013, B25070, B25014, B25047), with population also referenced from the 2020 Decennial Census and the Population Estimates Program where noted.
4. Texas agencies, research centers, and local reporting: Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center, Up For Growth, the Texas Attorney General and Department of Housing and Community Affairs (colonias), the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, Princeton's Eviction Lab, the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston, and local and statewide journalism (Texas Tribune, Houston Public Media, KXAN, KVUE, KSAT, the Rio Grande Guardian, and others).

Methodology Note on Data Provenance

Every federal figure in this report - HUD Fair Market Rents, NLIHC housing wages and shortage figures, and Census ACS estimates - was retrieved and cross-validated against its primary source in June 2026, not drawn from cached prior knowledge. The HUD FY2026 figures come from HUD's revised areawide data file; the historical FY2020-FY2025 series was validated against HUD's FY2025 spreadsheet to the dollar. NLIHC values were taken from the authoritative Texas data file and reconcile to the formula (housing wage = annual 2BR FMR / 2,080 hours) within a cent. Census values were cross-checked for internal consistency (occupied plus vacant equals total units; owner plus renter equals occupied) across all sixteen geographies, and no figure is reported that could not be confirmed live. State and local figures (homelessness counts, eviction filings, insurance premiums, property taxes, colonia counts, man-camp capacity) are attributed to the named report or outlet and should be re-verified against those sources as those reports are updated.

Honest provenance over false precision. Where a figure carries a known caveat - student-renter effects on College Station and Lubbock cost burden, methodology-driven volatility in the Permian FMR jumps, county-level rather than colonia-specific housing-quality data, and the FY2026 areawide FMR not equaling the ZIP-level payment standard in the Dallas and Fort Worth SAFMR metros - that caveat is stated where the figure appears.

Fair Market Rent Notes

• HUD Fair Market Rent represents roughly the 40th percentile of area rents; actual market rents are often higher.
• FMR fiscal years begin October 1 of the prior calendar year (FY2026 applies starting October 1, 2025).
• Dallas and Fort Worth-Arlington are mandatory Small Area FMR metros, where voucher payment standards are set at the ZIP-code level and can run materially above or below the areawide 2BR figure shown here. The other thirteen markets use areawide FMR.
• The FY2026 areawide figures are HUD's revised values; several metros (Austin, San Antonio, Midland, Odessa) show a year-over-year decline reflecting post-2024 rent softening as a record apartment-delivery wave was absorbed.

Minimum Wage and Housing Wage Notes

• Texas uses the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. State law preempts both local minimum wages and local rent control, so no Texas city has a higher minimum wage or a rent cap.
• NLIHC Out of Reach 2025 (the edition cited) uses HUD FY2025 Fair Market Rents. The housing wage equals the annual income needed to afford the 2BR FMR at 30 percent of income, divided by 2,080 full-time hours.

Census Attribution Notes

• County and state population figures labeled "ACS 2019-2023" are 5-year period estimates and differ from the 2020 Decennial count and the annual Population Estimates Program figures, both of which are labeled distinctly where used.
• Cost-burden percentages are the share of renter households paying 30 percent or more (and 50 percent or more) of household income on gross rent, per ACS table B25070, with the "not computed" category excluded from the denominator.
• The overcrowding and plumbing figures for border counties are county-wide aggregates, not colonia-specific measurements; the Census Bureau does not delineate colonias as a geography.

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Complete Source Index

Federal Data

State, Regional, and Research

News and Reporting

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This report was researched and compiled by John Cronin, founder of Rookd - a verified housing platform. Every statistic includes a named source and a verifiable link. Federal housing data was retrieved and cross-validated against primary sources in June 2026. No data was fabricated or estimated without clear notation. Research spans fifteen Texas housing markets across the state's major metros, the border and Rio Grande Valley, the Permian Basin, the Gulf Coast, and its university and military communities.

Last updated: June 2026