The State of Short-Term Rentals in Port Aransas
How much lodging tax the island collects, how it compares to peer Texas coastal cities, and a dated snapshot of the active vacation-rental market — built entirely on public data.
Port Aransas lives and dies by the visitor. On a barrier island of a few thousand year-round residents, the summer crowd multiplies the population many times over, and a very large share of the beds those visitors sleep in are short-term rentals — beach houses, condos, and canal homes booked by the night rather than hotel rooms. That makes the health of the short-term rental (STR) market one of the most important economic signals on the island, and one of the most argued-about: how much money does lodging actually generate, how fast is it growing, and how does Port A stack up against the other Texas coastal towns competing for the same travelers?
This report answers those questions with public data only. Every figure below traces to a government source — the Texas Comptroller's open-data portal and the U.S. Census Bureau — and nothing is estimated, modeled, or filled in where the record is silent. Where a dataset simply does not cover a year, we say so rather than guessing. The goal is a resource a reporter, a city official, or a prospective rental owner can cite with confidence, refreshed on a recurring basis as new government data is published.
The headline numbers
$5,365,955
Port Aransas, FY 2020 · 7.0% rate
6
Texas coastal cities benchmarked on lodging tax
$23,111,482
Mixed-beverage receipts, 2025
What the lodging tax tells us
Texas cities levy a local Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) on every paid night of short-term lodging — hotels, motels, and short-term rentals alike. Because the tax applies to all of them together, the total a city collects is the single best public measure of its lodging economy. State law does not break the revenue out by property type, so there is no public figure for "STR-only" tax; the honest read is that HOT captures the whole visitor-lodging pie, of which vacation rentals are a dominant slice in a beach town like Port Aransas.
| Fiscal year | HOT revenue | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| FY 2017 | $4,871,302 | 7.0% |
| FY 2020 | $5,365,955 | 7.0% |
A note on coverage: the Comptroller's local HOT dataset only contains the years cities actually reported, and Port Aransas' entries are sparse. We show exactly the years on file and do not interpolate the gaps — a missing year here means the state has no published figure, not zero revenue.
How Port A compares on the coast
Each bar is a city's most recent lodging-tax haul on file. The big metros — Galveston and Corpus Christi — dwarf the smaller barrier-island towns in raw dollars, which is expected given their hotel inventory. The more telling comparison for Port Aransas is against its true peers: the small coastal communities that, like Port A, run on vacation rentals rather than convention hotels.
Bars show each city's latest available fiscal-year local Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue; the year varies by city based on what the state has published. Port Aransas is highlighted.
The season, in bar tabs
Lodging tax is reported too infrequently to show month-to-month rhythm, so we use a second public dataset as a high-frequency proxy: mixed-beverage gross receipts, the alcohol sales that bars and restaurants report to the state every month. When visitors flood the island, tabs run up; when they leave, the island goes quiet. The monthly curve below is the clearest public picture of Port Aransas' tourism seasonality, and it maps exactly onto what locals feel — a spring-break-to-summer peak and a deep winter trough.
- 2024
- 2025
- 2026
Monthly mixed-beverage gross receipts reported to the Texas Comptroller by all Port Aransas venues (aggregate only; no individual business is shown).
$20,178,588
2024 total
$23,111,482
2025 total
$10,714,341
2026 total (year to date — incomplete)
The active rental market, snapshotted
The live listing snapshot for this edition is being prepared and will appear here once captured. This section reports a dated, point-in-time count of active vacation-rental listings rather than an estimate.
An island built for visitors
Census data underscores just how much of Port Aransas exists to host travelers rather than to house full-time residents.
36.4%
of housing units are for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use
3,072
Year-round population
$88,947
Median household income
Sources & methodology
This report is assembled entirely from public data and refreshed on a recurring basis. Lodging-tax and mixed-beverage figures come directly from the Texas Comptroller's open-data portal; we store each value on its own dated record so the numbers you see are exactly what the state published, never a rounded or adjusted version. Mixed-beverage figures are reported here only in aggregate — monthly and annual totals for the whole city — and never for an individual bar or restaurant. Where a figure is genuinely unavailable, we leave it out and say so rather than estimate it. That is the whole point of the Research pillar: a citable, transparent baseline that improves every time the underlying agencies publish new data.
- Texas Comptroller — Local Hotel Occupancy Tax (data.texas.gov) — last pulled July 18, 2026
- Texas Comptroller — Mixed Beverage Gross Receipts (data.texas.gov) — last pulled July 18, 2026
- U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey 5-Year (2024) — last pulled July 20, 2026
- U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey 5-Year (2022) — last pulled July 19, 2026
- U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey 5-Year (2023) — last pulled July 18, 2026
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