Where Austin Homeowners Are Actually Moving in 2026, and How Investors Should Trade It

Here is a sentence that would have sounded absurd in 2021: Travis County is shrinking.

Population fell 1.0% from 2023 to 2024, the county's first decline in more than two decades, per the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 estimates. The turn started earlier: Travis County recorded its first net domestic out-migration since 2002 in 2022 to 2023, and the trend accelerated the following year.

Unlock MLS Research and the Austin Board of REALTORS just published the 2026 Central Texas Homeowner Affordability Index, and buried inside the policy discussion is one of the cleanest demand-migration datasets an investor could ask for. People are not leaving the region. They are repricing themselves within it, and a smaller but growing share is leaking to Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston entirely.

If you invest in Central Texas, this is the map. Here is how Taylor reads it.

The Migration Table

Two things jump out. First, the growth rates in the collar counties are enormous, and 83% to 88% of that suburban growth is migration, not births. These are moving trucks, not maternity wards. Second, the carrying-cost column explains the population column almost by itself. A household relocating from Travis to Caldwell County cuts its baseline monthly ownership cost by $992, nearly $11,900 per year. Bastrop saves $793 per month. That is not a lifestyle preference. That is a raise.

Note what "carrying cost" means here: the all-in monthly bill for a long-tenured owner of a median-value home, covering mortgage principal and interest, property tax, insurance, and utilities. Households have figured out what many listing agents still price around: the sticker is not the cost. The monthly is the cost.

Why the Monthly Is Running the Market Now

Every non-mortgage line in the ownership stack is on its own escalator, and none of it responds to local sentiment:

Insurance: Texas premiums rose 60% from 2019 to 2024, twice the national rate and the steepest trajectory in the country, per the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Property taxes: Statewide levies rose roughly 22% from 2021 to 2025 (Texas Comptroller). In Travis County, 187,000 owners protested appraisals in 2024, which is 39% of all parcels, the highest rate of any major Texas county. Appraisal disputes stay murky in part because Texas is a non-disclosure state.

Utilities: Austin Energy, Austin Water, and Texas Gas Service are mid-stream in approved multi-year rate increases.

The report's core sensitivity metric: every additional $100 per month in carrying cost pushes roughly 9,800 Central Texas owner households past the HUD 30% cost-burden threshold. The county-level detail matters for underwriting demand:

Read that last column carefully. The cheapest counties are also the most fragile per dollar of cost increase. That cuts two ways for an investor: it means a deep, durable pool of renters-by-necessity in the outlying counties (households priced out of buying stay renters longer), and it means rent growth assumptions there need a ceiling, because the tenant base has the least slack.

The School District Tell

If you want a leading indicator of where family households are actually forming, watch enrollment, because state funding follows the child and districts count heads obsessively.

Austin ISD has fallen from roughly 84,000 students in 2014 to roughly 72,000 in 2024, a 14.5% decline, and now projects a $181 million deficit for FY2026-27. Meanwhile the surrounding districts (Round Rock, Leander, Hays CISD) are each adding on the order of 1,000 students per year.

Families with kids are the marginal buyer of starter homes and the anchor tenant of single-family rentals. The enrollment data says they have already voted, and they voted for the collar districts. For SFR and build-to-rent underwriting, suburban enrollment growth is a cleaner demand signal than any listing-portal heat map.

The Workforce Gap Is a Rental Map

The people being priced out of the urban core are not leaving the labor market. They are commuting back into it:

Roughly 70% of Austin EMS Association members live outside Austin city limits. About 22.1% of Austin-metro workers commute 50 miles or more, the highest super-commuter share of any major Texas metro, per the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The report names where the priced-out workforce is landing: Pflugerville, Manor, Del Valle, and unincorporated parts of the region.

Two-earner public-servant households illustrate the squeeze precisely. Two EMS field medics earn a combined $113,437 and sit at 26.6% of income against the Travis baseline; a $400 monthly cost increase pushes them to 30.9%, past the burden line. Two AISD teachers cross at the same increment. These households need housing near the eastern and southeastern job-access corridors, at monthly numbers Travis County increasingly cannot produce. That is a durable, wage-backed tenant base with essentially recession-proof employers.

The Number That Caps Everything

One stat in the report should temper every aggressive pro forma: Dallas-Fort Worth now draws 13.4% of its new arrivals from the Austin metro, and Houston draws 14.4%. Most out-migration is still intra-regional, which redistributes demand to the collar counties. But the share leaving Central Texas entirely is a leak in the boat. It caps long-run rent growth and exit-price assumptions, and it is exactly why the Dallas Fed's affordability figure matters to investors: the share of Texas-metro homes affordable to a median-income household fell from roughly 60% pre-pandemic to 32% by late 2023. Your exit buyer is inside that shrinking number.

What This Does to Underwriting

If your operating assumptions predate 2023, they are wrong. The adjustments:

The lock-in effect deserves its own line: roughly 56% of Texas mortgages carry rates below 4%, and the FHFA estimates lock-in suppressed about 1.72 million sales nationally while inflating prices roughly 7%. For acquisitions, that is the entire case for off-market sourcing. The best inventory is mathematically discouraged from ever hitting the MLS, and the owners most exposed to carrying-cost creep (equity-rich, cash-poor, often long-tenured) are precisely the sellers who transact through relationships rather than listings.

Four Trades

1. Workforce rental corridors, east and southeast. Manor, Del Valle, Pflugerville, Bastrop, and the Caldwell County line (Lockhart) combine the lowest carrying-cost baselines in the region with documented workforce absorption and suburban enrollment growth. Taylor's own conviction here is not theoretical; Echelon Property Group recently assembled and closed a 9-acre mixed-use development site in the Goodnight Ranch and Easton Park corridor, squarely inside this thesis.

2. Missing-middle infill in the core. The City of Austin's HOME Initiative, missing-middle zoning districts, and Site Plan Lite improvements are a genuine entitlement tailwind for small-scale infill (duplexes, triplexes, cottage courts) in a jurisdiction that spent decades blocking exactly that product. Land basis plus by-right density is the play; the report explicitly endorses these reforms as the region's primary supply lever.

3. Buy the monthly, not the sticker. The spread between a seller's price expectation and a property's true carrying cost is where 2026 deals pencil or die. Walk into negotiations with the real insurance quote, the post-sale tax reassessment, and the utility rate schedule, and price from there. Most counterparties still have not done this math, which is a large part of why houses in Austin do not sell.

4. Underwrite the exit like a skeptic. With the affordable-buyer pool at 32% of median-income households and two rival metros importing Austin's out-migrants, hold-period assumptions should carry the weight, not terminal-value heroics.

The Bottom Line

Travis County going negative is not the end of the Austin story. It is a redistribution, and redistributions are where positioning gets rewarded. The demand did not disappear; it moved 20 to 40 miles, dropped its monthly nut by $400 to $1,000, and enrolled its kids in Hays CISD.

The overwhelming majority of Echelon Property Group's transaction volume has come from off-market and relationship-driven deals, which is where this market's real inventory lives. If you want deal flow aligned with the migration data instead of against it, reach Taylor Sherwood at 512.661.3843 or taylor@echelonpropertygroup.com.

*Data throughout from the 2026 Central Texas Homeowner Affordability Index (Unlock MLS Research and the Austin Board of REALTORS), citing the U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Texas Comptroller, Texas A&M Transportation Institute, Texas Real Estate Research Center, Cotality, and FHFA.*