Port Aransas Real Estate & Property Value Report
How the island's property market has moved year over year — total appraised value, the condo-vs-single-family split, and new-construction activity — using the Nueces Central Appraisal District's certified rolls. No sale prices: Texas is a non-disclosure state.
Property is the defining conversation on Mustang Island. Everyone from the year-round shrimper to the weekend condo owner has a stake in what a lot on the beach side is worth, whether the market is still climbing after the pandemic rush, and how much of the island is being built up versus held as bare sand. Yet reliable, island-specific numbers are surprisingly hard to come by — most of what circulates is a realtor's asking price or a neighbor's rumor. This report replaces that noise with the one authoritative, public record of local property value: the annual appraisal roll the Nueces Central Appraisal District (NCAD) certifies for the City of Port Aransas.
One caveat shapes everything below, and we want it stated plainly up front: Texas is a non-disclosure state. Under Section 22.27 of the Texas Tax Code, the actual price a property sells for is confidential and is never released to the public. There is no legal, public source for Port Aransas sale prices or sales volume, so you will find none here — no median sale price, no "homes sold last quarter," nothing derived from a closing statement. What is public, and what this report is built on, is the appraisal district's assessed value of every parcel: the market and appraised values NCAD assigns for taxation. Those figures move with the market but are a distinct, government-produced measure — and, critically, they are reported only in aggregate for the whole city, never as a private individual's number.
Every figure in this report traces to a specific NCAD certified (or, for the current year, preliminary) totals document, with the appraisal year and the district's certification date attached. Where a breakdown is not available in a given year's roll, we leave the gap empty rather than estimate it. The result is a citable baseline that refreshes each summer as the district certifies a new roll.
The headline numbers
$7.54B
City of Port Aransas, 2026 (preliminary)
+8.2%
2025 to 2026 total market value
10,353
On the 2026 roll (preliminary)
$208M
New value added, 2026 (preliminary)
The island's total value over time
The single broadest measure of the Port Aransas market is the total value of everything on the city's tax roll. The line below tracks two closely related figures the district publishes each year: total market value (what NCAD estimates the property would sell for) and total appraised value (the capped figure actually used for taxation). The trajectory tells the island's recent economic story — a steep run-up through the post-2020 coastal boom, when appraisals across Texas surged, followed by the more jagged, plateauing pattern of the last few rolls as the market found a new level.
- Total market value
- Total appraised value
Certified appraisal-roll totals for the City of Port Aransas (NCAD taxing unit C08). Years marked with an asterisk are preliminary rolls, subject to protest and change before certification.
Condos vs. houses: the beach-town split
Port Aransas does not have a housing stock like an ordinary Texas town. The appraisal roll splits residential property into state categories, and the two that dominate the island are single-family homes (category A1) and condominiums (category A4). In most of Texas single-family homes vastly outnumber condos; here the two are nearly even, and by parcel count the island actually carries slightly more condominium units than detached houses — a direct reflection of the beachfront tower and townhome developments built to serve vacationers. Single-family homes still hold more total value, because the island's large canal and beachfront houses appraise higher per unit, but the condo column is what makes Port A's tax base distinctive on the Texas coast.
$3.94B
Single-family value · 3,350 parcels (2026)
$1.64B
Condominium value · 3,429 parcels (2026)
- Single-family value
- Condominium value
Total market value by residential category — A1 single-family vs. A4 condominiums — from the NCAD roll's state-category breakdown for Port Aransas. Asterisked years are preliminary.
How much is being built
Each year the appraisal district records the dollar value of brand-new construction added to the roll — a freshly built beach house, a new condo building, an addition that did not exist the year before. This "new value" figure is the cleanest public signal of how fast Port Aransas is physically growing, and it carries the long shadow of Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall just up the coast in August 2017 and leveled a large share of the island's structures. The rebuild that followed drove years of unusually heavy construction; the figures below show new value still being added at a substantial clip, then easing as the post-Harvey rebuilding wave and the pandemic building boom both matured. A note of honesty on coverage: the district reports this figure only in the more recent rolls, so earlier years are shown as gaps rather than guesses.
"Total new value" added to the Port Aransas roll each year (NCAD). This is the appraised value of new construction, not a permit count. Asterisked years are preliminary.
The roll, year by year
| Roll year | Market value | Appraised value | Parcels |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | $3,584,097,335 | $3,556,761,482 | 9,416 |
| 2022 | $4,509,111,401 | $4,481,770,468 | 9,807 |
| 2023 | $6,565,780,782 | $6,525,847,699 | 10,398 |
| 2024 | $7,137,130,860 | $7,094,654,251 | 10,714 |
| 2025 | $6,976,089,092 | $6,933,074,811 | 11,001 |
| 2026 (preliminary) | $7,544,988,662 | $7,501,978,523 | 10,353 |
For a sense of a typical owner-occupied home: on the 2024 roll the district counted 1,026 homesteaded residences in Port Aransas with an average market value of $887,026. This is an appraised average for primary residences that claim a homestead exemption — not a sale price, and not the many second homes and rentals that make up most of the island.
Why there are no sale prices here
If you have shopped for property in Port Aransas, you have probably noticed that listing sites show asking prices but rarely what a home actually closed for. That is not an oversight — it is Texas law. Texas is one of a handful of non-disclosure states, meaning the sale price of real property is not part of the public record. Appraisal districts obtain sales data confidentially to do their work, but they are barred from releasing it, and there is no county deed-price index a member of the public can pull. Any "median sale price" you see for a small market like Port Aransas is an estimate stitched together from partial, private feeds — exactly the kind of unverifiable number this report refuses to publish. Instead we anchor everything to the appraisal roll, which is genuinely public, genuinely local, and produced by a government body on a fixed annual schedule. It is a different lens than sale prices, but it is an honest one.
The people behind the parcels
The appraisal roll counts far more parcels than there are permanent residents, a gap that captures Port Aransas' identity as a second-home and vacation-rental island. For context, here is who actually lives here year-round, per the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
3,268
Year-round population
1,496
Year-round households
$88,947
Median household income
Sources & methodology
Property-value figures are transcribed from the Nueces Central Appraisal District's published Certified (and current-year Preliminary) Appraisal Roll Totals for taxing unit C08, the City of Port Aransas. For each year we record the Grand Totals page (total market value, total appraised value, parcel count) and, where the roll provides it, the state-category breakdown that separates single-family (A1) from condominium (A4) value, plus the "total new value" representing new construction added that year. Each figure is stored on its own dated record tied to a specific roll document, so what you see is exactly what the district certified. Demographic context comes from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-year estimates for Port Aransas city. Consistent with Texas non-disclosure law, this report contains no sale prices or transaction counts, and all appraisal figures are citywide aggregates — never an individual property owner's number. Where a breakdown is unavailable for a given year, we omit it rather than estimate.
- Nueces Central Appraisal District — Certified Appraisal Roll Totals (C08 City of Port Aransas) — last pulled July 11, 2026
- U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey 5-Year (Port Aransas city) — last pulled July 11, 2026
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