Port Aransas by the Numbers
A demographic portrait of the island and its Coastal Bend neighbors — population, age, households, income, and how much of the housing stock sits empty for seasonal use — drawn entirely from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
Numbers rarely capture the feel of a place, but for a barrier-island town like Port Aransas they come surprisingly close. The island is small, older, and wealthier than the mainland communities around it, and an extraordinary share of its homes sit dark for much of the year, waiting for a weekend or a summer week that belongs to someone who lives somewhere else. Each of those facts is visible in the public record, and together they explain a great deal about how the town works — why the school district is small, why housing is expensive, why the winter feels quiet and the Fourth of July feels like a different city entirely.
This report assembles that portrait from a single authoritative source: the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), the same rolling survey that underpins federal funding formulas and local planning across the country. We pull the five-year ACS estimates, which combine sixty months of responses to produce reliable figures even for very small places like Port Aransas, where a single-year survey would be too thin to trust. Every figure below is a real, published Census estimate — nothing here is modeled, guessed, or filled in where the survey is silent. Where a number carries a margin of error, as all survey estimates do, we present the point estimate the Bureau publishes and name the vintage so you can trace it back to the source.
To make the island legible, we set it against its neighbors. Aransas Pass and Rockport are the nearest peer towns; Corpus Christi is the region's anchor city; and Aransas and Nueces counties frame the whole Coastal Bend around them. Comparing Port Aransas to these places is what turns a lone statistic into a story — a median age of the low fifties reads very differently once you see that Corpus Christi's is nearly two decades younger, and a housing stock that is more than a third seasonal only lands once you notice how rare that is even a few miles inland.
The island at a glance
3,268
Year-round residents, 2024 ACS
52.3
Years — well above the Texas median
$88,947
Median household income
36.4%
Of homes are for seasonal/occasional use
A small town in a big region
Port Aransas' year-round population is a rounding error next to Corpus Christi's, and smaller than either Aransas Pass or Rockport. That permanent headcount is the number that pays for the school, staffs the city, and votes in local elections — even as the summer population swells many times over. The gap between who lives here and who visits here is the central tension of island life, and it starts with this baseline.
Total population, most recent ACS 5-year estimate. Port Aransas is highlighted.
The dark-window problem
The single most revealing figure about Port Aransas is how much of its housing is not lived in year-round. The Census tracks homes held "for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use" — second homes, beach houses, and the vast inventory of vacation rentals. On the island that category covers 36.4% of all housing units, a concentration you simply do not see in an ordinary Texas town. Compare it to the mainland cities and the counties below: the further you get from the beach, the smaller the slice becomes. This is the statistical fingerprint of a resort economy, and it drives everything from home prices to how hard it is to staff a restaurant in July.
Share of total housing units classified as vacant "for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use," most recent ACS 5-year estimate.
Older, and better off
Two numbers travel together on the island: age and income. Port Aransas skews markedly older than the mainland — a community shaped by retirees and second-home owners rather than young families — and its median household income sits at the top of this peer group. A resort island with a high cost of housing tends to select for residents who already have means, which in turn reinforces the price pressure that makes it hard for the workers who keep the town running to live in it. The chart shows where each community's median household income lands.
Median household income, most recent ACS 5-year estimate. Port Aransas is highlighted.
Port Aransas
52.3
median age
The full table
Every figure this report renders, side by side. Households counts occupied homes; housing units counts every home whether occupied or not; and the seasonal share is the slice of those units held for occasional use. Blank cells mean the Census did not publish that estimate for that place.
| Area | Population | Median age | Households | Median income | Housing units | Seasonal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Port Aransas | 3,268 | 52.3 | 1,496 | $88,947 | 5,375 | 36.4% |
| Aransas Pass | 8,972 | 42.7 | 3,643 | $63,021 | 4,989 | 13.5% |
| Rockport | 10,683 | 51.2 | 5,692 | $72,174 | 7,197 | 18.9% |
| Corpus Christi | 317,419 | 36.9 | 118,741 | $67,394 | 136,279 | 2.4% |
| Aransas County | 24,876 | 49.9 | 12,478 | $69,466 | 15,999 | 19.2% |
| Nueces County | 352,955 | 37.2 | 131,160 | $66,897 | 154,408 | 3.5% |
A note on precision: ACS figures are survey estimates, not a full count, and each carries a margin of error the Bureau publishes alongside it. For small places like Port Aransas those margins can be meaningful, so treat these as the best available estimates rather than exact tallies. We show the newest vintage available for each place and never interpolate a value the survey does not report.