Almost everything that moves money in Port Aransas moves because a visitor decided to come to the island. On a barrier-island town of a few thousand year-round residents, the tourists who arrive each spring and summer are not a side business — they are the business. Yet "the tourism economy" is usually discussed in impressions rather than numbers: everyone agrees the summer is busy, but how busy, in which direction, and compared to when? This report pulls three independent public datasets into one place so the island's visitor economy can be read as a trend rather than a feeling.

We look at it from three angles that rarely lie in the same direction by accident. First, the local Hotel Occupancy Tax — the tax on every paid night of lodging — is the clearest public measure of how much visitors are spending to sleep on the island. Second, the city's monthly sales-tax allocation from the state tracks retail and dining activity at a much higher frequency, showing the shape of the season month by month. Third, employment data for the Leisure & Hospitality sector tells us how many jobs that spending actually supports. When all three move together, the story is real; when they diverge, that divergence is itself worth noticing.

Every figure below traces to a government source — the Texas Comptroller's open-data portal and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — and nothing is estimated, modeled, or filled in where the record is silent. Where a dataset does not cover a year, we say so rather than guess. This report deliberately does not repeat the peer-city lodging benchmark or the vacation-rental listing snapshot from The State of Short-Term Rentals, nor the demographic detail in Port A by the Numbers; think of it instead as the wide shot of the whole visitor economy those reports zoom into.

The headline numbers

Lodging tax collected

$5,365,955

Port Aransas, FY 2020 · 7.0% rate

Sales-tax allocation

$4,302,085

City of Port Aransas, 2025

Leisure & hospitality jobs

22,269

Nueces County (private), 2025

Lodging: what visitors pay to stay

The local Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) is charged on every paid night of short-term lodging in the city — hotels, motels, condos, and vacation rentals alike. Because it applies to all of them together, the total the city collects is the single best public gauge of how much money visitors spend to sleep on the island in a given year. State law does not split the revenue out by property type, so there is no public "hotels-only" or "rentals-only" figure; the honest read is that HOT captures the entire visitor-lodging pie.

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 Port Aransas actually reported, and those entries are sparse. We show exactly the years on file and never interpolate the gaps — a missing year here means the state has no published figure, not zero revenue. For how the island's lodging haul stacks up against peer Texas coastal cities, see the Short-Term Rentals report.

Retail: the season, month by month

Lodging tax is reported too infrequently to show the rhythm of a season, so we use a second public dataset as a high-frequency proxy: the sales-tax allocation the state sends the City of Port Aransas each month. It reflects the city's share of local sales-tax collections — the taxable retail, dining, and shopping that happens on the island — and it arrives every single month. The curve below is the clearest public picture of Port Aransas' economic seasonality, and it maps onto exactly what locals feel: a spring-to-summer surge and a quiet winter.

2023
2024
2025
2026

Monthly municipal sales-tax allocation paid to the City of Port Aransas by the Texas Comptroller. City-level aggregate only; no individual business is shown. Missing months read as gaps, never as zero.

$3,824,850

2023 total

$3,827,390

2024 total

$4,302,085

2025 total

$2,146,434

2026 total (7 mo — incomplete)

Jobs: who the visitor economy employs

A note on geography: the federal jobs data below is reported for Nueces County — the county Port Aransas belongs to — not for the city itself. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish Leisure & Hospitality employment at the city level, so a Port-Aransas-only jobs figure does not exist in the public record and we do not invent one. Read these as regional context for the sector that Port Aransas' visitor economy is part of.

The Quarterly Census of Employment & Wages (QCEW) counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance — a near-complete census of formal employment rather than a survey estimate. The figures below cover the private Leisure & Hospitality supersector (accommodation, food service, arts, entertainment, and recreation), the part of the economy most directly tied to tourism. They tell us how many people the visitor economy keeps working across the wider Corpus Christi area, and what those jobs pay on average.

Year	Avg. employment	Establishments	Avg. annual pay
2021	20,379	1,021	$21,793
2022	21,292	1,013	$22,756
2023	22,298	1,033	$23,407
2024	22,180	1,025	$24,032
2025	22,269	1,039	$24,249

Annual-average private Leisure & Hospitality employment, Nueces County, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics QCEW.

A note on timing: QCEW is published with a long vintage lag. Full-year data for a given year is not released until roughly the autumn of the following year, so the most recent calendar year or two will not appear here until the BLS publishes it. We show the latest years on file and add newer ones automatically as they land — we never estimate the missing tail.

Sources & methodology

This report is assembled entirely from public data and refreshed on a recurring basis. Lodging-tax and sales-tax figures come directly from the Texas Comptroller's open-data portal; employment figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics QCEW. Every value is stored on its own dated, source-attributed record, so the numbers you see are exactly what the agencies published — never a rounded, modeled, or adjusted version. Sales-tax and employment figures are reported here only in aggregate (city or county totals) and never for an individual business. Where a figure is genuinely unavailable — a year the state never reported, a geography the BLS does not publish — we leave it out and say so rather than estimate it.

Texas Comptroller — Local Hotel Occupancy Tax (data.texas.gov) — last pulled July 11, 2026
Texas Comptroller — Monthly Sales Tax Allocations to Cities (data.texas.gov) — last pulled July 11, 2026
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Quarterly Census of Employment & Wages (QCEW) — last pulled July 15, 2026

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