The Eanes Premium: What Austin Buyers Really Pay for Westlake Schools, and Whether It Holds in 2026

On August 18, 2026, the Eanes ISD board adopted a tax rate of $0.8254 per $100 of value. The next night, Lake Travis ISD adopted $1.0329. The two districts share a border west of Austin and, thanks to state compression, the exact same maintenance and operations rate of $0.7054. The entire 20.75-cent gap is debt. Eanes carries 12 cents of it. Lake Travis carries 32.75.

That is the quiet half of the Eanes premium. The loud half is in the MLS. Over the twelve months ending August 31, 2026, homes in 78746 closed at a median of $563 per square foot. Across the line in 78738, the number was $281. Across Lake Austin in 78732, Leander ISD territory, it was $271. Buyers on the Eanes side are paying two times per foot for roughly the same amount of house.

This guide measures the premium three ways (by zip code, at the district boundary, and across the full 2020 to 2026 cycle), separates what the schools are worth from what the land and the tax structure are worth, runs the tax math on a $2,000,000 homestead under the rates adopted in the last four weeks, and names the things that could shrink the premium from here. It is written for buyers deciding whether to pay it and for owners deciding whether it will still be there when they sell.

One disclosure before the numbers. Market data is Unlock MLS, trailing twelve months through August 31, 2026, pulled through Agent Intel unless a table says otherwise. Tax rates are the 2026 adopted rates where a taxing unit has already voted and the 2025 adopted rates where it has not; Austin ISD, Travis County, Central Health and Austin Community College all vote in late September. This is general education from a broker who works these streets, not tax or legal advice.

Where the line actually is

Eanes ISD is small. One high school, two middle schools, five elementary campuses since Valley View closed in 2025, and roughly 7,450 students, of whom 2.9 percent are economically disadvantaged. The district sits west of MoPac and south of Lake Austin and takes in the cities of West Lake Hills and Rollingwood, the unincorporated Travis County pockets that Westlake Fire protects (Lost Creek, Rob Roy, Camelot, Westwood, Rolling Hills West, St. Stephens, Rivercrest and Riverhills), and a few areas inside Austin city limits, Davenport Ranch among them.

In zip-code terms that means nearly all of 78746, most of 78733, and edges of 78731, 78735 and 78730. The trap is 78735. Lost Creek and some western sections are Eanes; the rest, including most of what the MLS calls Barton Creek, is Austin ISD. One street can be the difference, and the difference is measured in six figures.

The only source that counts is the district's own property search on its boundary map page. Not the listing's school field, which agents fill in by hand. Not a portal's school module, which guesses from geography. If a contract is going to carry a seven-figure premium for the district, the address gets verified against the map before the option period, not after.

A word on the two rankings, because buyers ask. Niche weights test scores, outcomes and parent surveys and puts Eanes first in Texas. US News weights outcomes for disadvantaged students heavily and ranks admission-based magnet campuses at the top, which is how Westlake lands at #53 in the state. Both are true. Only one of them moves prices, and the buyer pool reads Niche.

The premium by zip code

Here is every zip that touches or borders the district, sorted by price per foot, with the City of Austin as the baseline.

Source: Unlock MLS via Agent Intel, residential closings, trailing twelve months through August 31, 2026. Success rate is closed listings divided by all listings that ended.

The ratios are the story. 78746 trades at 2.00 times 78738 per foot and 2.08 times 78732. Against 78735, the Austin ISD side of the same hills, it is 1.57 times. Against the city as a whole, 1.90 times. The quieter Eanes zip, 78733, still carries a 1.51 to 1.56 times multiple over its Lake Travis and Leander neighbors, with more land per dollar and the fastest median days on market in the table.

The one non-Eanes zip that beats it per foot is 78703, and that is a lot-size artifact. Tarrytown and Pemberton Heights sell small houses on small lots close to downtown, so $622 buys about 2,200 square feet. In 78746, $563 buys about 3,300. The median sale in 78746 is $477,000 higher than the median sale in 78703 even though the per-foot number is lower, and our Tarrytown vs Westlake comparison covers that trade in detail.

Size is not the premium. Divide each zip's median price by its median price per foot and you get an implied median home size. It is an approximation (the two medians do not come from the same house), but it is a useful one.

Eanes, Lake Travis and Leander buyers are all buying a 3,100 to 3,300 square foot house. The Eanes buyer pays $975,000 more for it than the Lake Travis buyer at the median. Everything in that $975,000 is location, schools, tax structure and neighbors. None of it is drywall.

The premium is paid at closing by the people who get there. 78746 is not a fast market. Inventory sits at 5.44 months against 4.02 in 78738. The success rate is 56 percent against 67 percent. Sellers who did close gave up 3.97 percent from original ask to final list and another 4.99 percent from final list to contract, an 8.8 percent combined discount. Of 513 new listings in the trailing year, 268 took at least one price cut and 255 expired or were withdrawn. The premium is real; it is also negotiated, slowly, house by house.

Same product, other side of the line

Zip codes are blunt. The cleaner test is the one the academic literature uses: find two neighborhoods that are alike in everything except the district, and measure the gap.

The best pair in West Austin is Davenport Ranch and River Place. Both are 1990s to 2000s hillside subdivisions strung along RM 2222 and Westlake Drive above Lake Austin. Both sit inside Austin city limits, so both pay the City of Austin rate and the same county stack. Two things change at the line: the school district (Eanes at $0.8254 versus Leander ISD at $1.1169, a 29-cent gap) and the schools themselves. Vandegrift High School on the Leander side is a well regarded campus in a district that just posted 19 A-rated schools. This is not a good-school-versus-bad-school comparison. It is an Eanes-versus-not-Eanes comparison.

Source: Redfin Data Center via Agent Intel, "Davenport Lake Austin" and "Mansfield-River Place" neighborhood boundaries, all residential. Both sides of this pair come from the same source and the same period.

Thirty-four percent per foot, forty-one percent on price, with the city line, the county line and the commute held constant. Note the direction of the year-over-year numbers, though: River Place is up 5.4 percent and Davenport is down 2.9 percent on a small sample. The premium is large and it is not a straight line.

The second pair is a luxury-tier comparison: the MLS neighborhood of Westlake, which is Eanes, against the MLS neighborhood of Barton Creek, which is Austin ISD. Same buyer pool, same price bracket, same architects, different district.

Now apply that to Eanes. Be generous and call the gap between Eanes and its neighbors two standard deviations of measured quality. The consensus literature says that is worth 6 to 8 percent on price, and the most aggressive district-level estimates say 20 percent. The observed gap is 100 percent per foot against Lake Travis ISD at the zip level, and 34 to 41 percent against River Place with the city and county held constant.

So the schools, in the narrow sense of test scores and ratings, explain a minority of the Eanes premium. Three other things explain the rest, and each of them matters more for resale than the rating does.

The tax structure. A permanently lower tax bill is a permanent annuity, and buyers capitalize it. The next section puts a number on it: $3,700 to $9,200 a year on a $2,000,000 homestead depending on which non-Eanes address you compare against, which is worth roughly 3 to 9 percent of the purchase price on its own once you capitalize it.

The land. Nobody is platting a new Rob Roy. The district is canyons, ridgelines and Lake Austin frontage ten minutes from downtown, and the supply of that is fixed. This is the part of the premium that has nothing to do with school boards and everything to do with topography, and it is the reason 78703 and 78735 also held up through the correction, as the cycle table below shows.

The neighbors. Bayer, Ferreira and McMillan's finding is the one most buyers have not heard: half the raw school premium is a premium for living near other people who paid it. That is the mechanism, not an insult. Households with the means to pay for Eanes pay to be near each other, and that sorting is self-reinforcing. It is also why a single B rating at Cedar Creek Elementary in 2026 did nothing to prices.

The Southern-market caveat from the 2021 meta-analysis cuts the other way. Across Texas, district lines move prices modestly. Eanes is the exception because it stacks all four drivers: a number-one rating, the lowest school tax rate of the four districts, scarce land, and thirty years of sorting. A premium built on test scores alone can evaporate in one accountability cycle. A premium built on land scarcity, a structurally lower rate and income sorting moves only when one of those moves. We list what could move them further down.

The tax offset, entity by entity

Texas property tax is a stack. Your bill is the sum of every taxing unit whose boundary your lot falls inside, and the Eanes line is also, in most places, a city line and a fire-district line. So the offset depends on which of several Eanes address types you are comparing to which non-Eanes address type. Here are seven of them.

Which rates are which: Eanes ISD ($0.8254, adopted August 18, 2026), Lake Travis ISD ($1.0329, August 19), Leander ISD ($1.1169, August 17) and the City of Austin ($0.579948, August 12, up 10.7 percent from $0.524017) are 2026 adopted rates. Austin ISD ($0.9252), West Lake Hills ($0.176783), Rollingwood ($0.202039), Lakeway ($0.16964), Central Health ($0.118023) and Austin Community College ($0.1034) are 2025 adopted rates pending September votes. Travis County is shown at its certified 2026 voter-approval ceiling of $0.386210; it cannot adopt higher without an election. Emergency services districts (Travis County ESD No. 9 for the Eanes side, ESD No. 6 for Lakeway) are shown at the $0.10 statutory maximum; confirm the adopted rate for a specific address. A Lakeway or Bee Cave address inside a municipal utility district would add a MUD levy on top; see our guide to MUD and PID taxes.

Three things jump out of that table.

First, the most expensive address type in West Austin is not Austin ISD. It is River Place: inside Austin city limits and inside Leander ISD, at $2.30 per $100. The cheapest is unincorporated Eanes at $1.53, because Lost Creek, Rob Roy and Camelot pay no city tax at all and buy their fire protection from ESD 9.

Second, the Lake Travis line is entirely debt. Both districts levy $0.7054 for operations. Lake Travis levies $0.3275 for debt service; Eanes levies $0.12, and has held that number since a two-cent cut in 2020-21 by refunding old bonds rather than issuing much new paper. Remember that when we get to the 2027 bond.

Third, the Eanes-to-Austin-ISD school gap is smaller than people think, just under ten cents. The big Eanes offset against a central Austin address is the City of Austin line, and that line just went up 10.7 percent.

On a $2,000,000 homestead. Assumptions: general homestead exemption on file, the $140,000 school exemption from Proposition 13 (November 2025), the 20 percent exemptions offered by the City of Austin, Travis County and Central Health, the 1 percent ACC exemption, and no city or ESD exemption. Over-65 and disabled owners get more; see our 2026 Texas homestead exemption guide.

Now turn the annual difference into what it is worth at purchase. A permanent saving is an annuity; divide it by a discount rate and you get the value a rational buyer should be willing to pay for it up front. We show two rates: 5 percent, roughly a long-run cap rate, and 6.5 percent, roughly a 2026 jumbo mortgage rate.

That last row is the Davenport Ranch versus River Place pair from earlier, and it is worth reading twice. Both addresses pay the City of Austin. The only tax difference is the school district line, $0.2915 per $100, which on a $1,500,000 taxable value is $4,372 a year and $67,000 to $87,000 of capitalized value. The observed price gap between the two neighborhoods was 41 percent. The tax structure explains roughly a sixth of it. The schools and the sorting explain the rest.

Does the premium hold? The full cycle, 2020 to 2026

The question every owner asks is whether the premium survives a down market. Austin just ran the experiment. The trailing twelve months ending August 2022 caught the top; the twelve months ending August 2026 are the current floor-finding phase. Here is every zip in the article at both points.

Source: Unlock MLS via Agent Intel, trailing twelve month windows ending August 31 of each year. Median price is sensitive to mix; the 78730 jump reflects larger and newer homes trading, not a 22 percent gain on any given house. Price per foot is the cleaner like-for-like measure.

The honest reading: Eanes did not escape the correction. Per foot, 78746 gave back 9.5 percent and 78733 gave back 7.4 percent. But the city gave back 15.4 percent, Lake Travis ISD's 78738 gave back 13.0 percent, and Leander ISD's 78732 gave back 15.0 percent. Both Eanes zips are above their 2022 medians in dollars. The two Austin ISD zips west of MoPac, 78703 and 78735, also held per foot, which is the land story showing through: scarce, close-in, hilly ground held everywhere it exists, and Eanes is the largest concentration of it.

Measured against the city, the premium did not just hold. It widened.

Over six years, 78746 is up 57 percent per foot and 57 percent at the median. The city is up 31 percent per foot and 36 percent at the median. The premium went from 58 percent to 90 percent above the city, and every checkpoint along the way was wider than the one before.

Where it gave was liquidity, not price. Inventory went from 2.19 months to 5.44. The success rate went from 76 percent to 56 percent. Median days on market went from 9 to 47, and the average is 91, which means a long tail of homes sitting past six months. Buyers still pay the premium. Sellers earn it slowly, and 44 percent of them do not earn it at all on the first attempt.

What could shrink the premium

Nothing above says the premium is permanent. It says the premium is built on four things, and each of them has a known stress point. Here they are, with what to watch and how Echelon Property Group reads each one.

Buying into Eanes without overpaying for the badge

The premium is real and the premium is negotiable. Both are true at once, and the buyers who do well in this district are the ones who separate the part they must pay from the part they can win back.

Start with where the premium is cheapest. Every one of these feeds Westlake High School.

Sources: Unlock MLS via Agent Intel; Davenport Ranch from Redfin Data Center via Agent Intel.

Then the checklist we run on every Eanes contract.

• Verify the district and the elementary zone on the district map, not the listing. The district redrew zones when Valley View closed. A listing that says "Eanes ISD" is a claim, not a fact, until the address comes back on the boundary map.

• Comp on the correct side of the line, and the correct side of Loop 360. A house in Rob Roy on the Canyon is not a house in West Lake Hills, and pricing it off Westlake neighborhood statistics adds six figures to the ask. Use Eanes closings on its own side of 360 and its own lot size. If the seller's comps cross the district line, discard them; a Barton Creek closing is not evidence for a Lost Creek price.

• Price the tax offset explicitly and stop there. Take the annual tax difference against the address you would otherwise buy, divide it by 6.5 percent, and that is the most the offset justifies. On a $2,000,000 West Lake Hills homestead against an Austin ISD address, that is about $86,000. Anything above that in the ask is being charged for schools and neighbors, which you can decide to pay, but not by accident.

• Use the failure rate. Forty-four percent of 78746 listings did not close in the trailing year and 268 of 513 took a price cut. A second-listing seller, a withdrawn seller and any listing past sixty days are where the negotiated part of the premium lives. The combined discount from original ask to contract for the sellers who did close was 8.8 percent; start there.

• Above $2 million, look where the listings are not. The Westlake neighborhood ran 89 closings against 89 expired and withdrawn listings. That is a market where a meaningful share of the best product never hits the MLS, or hits it and leaves. Our guide to off-market homes in Austin explains how the private side of this market works, and our guide to how to buy a luxury home in Austin covers the rest of the process.

• Underwrite the bond. Assume the Eanes I&S rate rises before you sell. If the purchase only works at the unincorporated $1.53 stack, it does not work. If it works at $1.70, you have margin.

One more sanity check: replacement cost. A new 4,000 square foot custom build in 78746 pencils at roughly $1,000 per foot all-in before land, per our analysis of what it costs to build a house in Austin. Existing Eanes homes are trading at $563. The premium over the districts next door is large; the discount to what it would cost to replace the house is larger, which is the single strongest argument that the premium has room to hold.

Selling in Eanes: the premium is earned, not announced

For owners, the same data reads differently. Fifty-six percent of 78746 sellers closed. In the Westlake neighborhood it was 51 percent. The premium is not attached to the deed; it is attached to the buyer who shows up, and the buyer who shows up has this table open on the other side of the negotiation.

Three things follow. Price per foot against your own side of the line, not against the best sale in the district. Use the first thirty days, because the median successful listing went under contract in 47 days and the average listing sat 91, and the gap between those two numbers is the drip of price cuts that turns a premium into a discount. And market the district precisely: name the elementary campus, name the attendance zone, and put the tax stack in the listing package, because the buyer paying for Eanes is paying for exactly those three things. Our guide to why luxury homes fail to sell in Austin has the full playbook, and our private listings guide covers how to test the price before it becomes a days-on-market number.

Where Echelon Property Group fits

Echelon Property Group works both sides of this line every week, and the practice is built for exactly the two problems this article describes: pricing the premium correctly, and finding the product that never shows up on a portal. Every closing above $2,000,000 that Taylor Sherwood has represented was sourced or transacted off the MLS, and West Austin is where that network is deepest. Send us an address and we will tell you which side of the line it is on, what its tax stack is, and what the last twelve months of closings on that side say it is worth. If you are thinking about the broader West Austin map, our guide to the most expensive neighborhoods in Austin ranks all of them on the same data.

About the author. Taylor Sherwood is the founder and principal REALTOR of Echelon Property Group in Austin, Texas, brokered by eXp Realty (TREC

#734520). He holds the CLHMS (Guild), GRI and ABR designations and has closed more than $150 million across 200-plus transactions in eleven-plus years, with a practice concentrated in West Austin luxury and Central Texas investment property. Every deal above $2 million he has closed was transacted off the MLS.

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