best in texas

2 Houston suburbs named top-10 best Texas cities to move to

Sugar Land is the 7th best Texas city to move to.

The City of Sugar Land, Texas – City Government/Facebook

Several Houston neighbors have been deemed the best Texas cities to move to, with two local suburbs – Sugar Land and League City – coming in among the top 10.

Advisors at ConsumerAffairs, a customer review and news platform, ranked the 50 most populated Texas cities across five main categories – affordability, safety, economy, health care and education, and quality of life – to determine which were the best places to move to. Each city was given a score out of 100 possible points.

Four out of the top five best places to move to in Texas are located in Dallas-Fort Worth: Allen (No .1), Frisco (No. 2), Plano (No. 3), and McKinney (No. 4). Leander, a suburb outside Austin, rounded out the top five.

Of all five categories considered, Sugar Land ranked highest – No. 4 – in the category of "health care and education." The city came in No. 5 for safety, No. 17 for economy, and No. 21 for quality of life. Its lowest ranking was No. 29, for affordability.

Sugar Land has been booming in recent years, and earlier in 2025 it was ranked the No. 3 best place to live in the U.S.. According to Livability.com's report, Sugar Land is well known as "one of the more affluent and rapidly growing master-planned communities in Texas" whose 90s-era population boom has only continued to grow.

Most recently, the City of Sugar Land acquired the 40-acre Imperial Sugar refinery complex for $50 million. The city is planning on redeveloping and renovating the land and its buildings, which include the iconic Char House.

In ConsumerAffairs separate ranking of the best places to live in the South, Sugar Land ranked 6th on the list.

Elsewhere in Houston
League City ranked right behind Sugar Land, and it topped the list with the best healthcare and education in Texas, and it is the 7th safest city in the state.

This suburb, located about 30 miles southeast of Houston, has earned its own reputation as the 7th fastest-growing, affordable city in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Pearland landed just outside the top 10 as the 11th best Texas city to move to with the second-best healthcare and education statewide.

Elsewhere across the Houston metro, three more suburbs made the list: Missouri City (No. 19), Conroe (No. 27), and Pasadena (No. 44). Surprisingly, The Woodlands was nowhere to be found in the rankings.

Despite many of its suburbs ranking highly on the list, Houston proper ranked at the bottom as the 50th best place in Texas to move to.

The top 10 best Texas cities to move to are:

No. 1 – Allen
No. 2 – Frisco
No. 3 – Plano
No. 4 – McKinney
No. 5 – Leander
No. 6 – Mansfield
No. 7 – Sugar Land
No. 8 – League City
No. 9 – Round Rock
No. 10 – Richardson

real estate suburbs consumeraffairs lists rankings houston sugar land league city

renter report

Houston home to No. 2 biggest drop in rent prices in U.S. since last year

Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti on Unsplash

Houston nearly topped the list with the second-biggest year-over-year decline in rent prices nationwide.

A new Zumper rent report has revealed that Texas is leading the nation in annual rent declines since 2025, and Houston rent prices have fallen as much as 14 percent since last August.

Zumper's monthly report analyzes one- and two-bedroom rent prices from the previous month across 100 U.S. cities, and tracks one-month and year-over-year changes.

Austin, Houston, and Dallas, respectively, locked out the top three cities where one-bedroom rent prices have plummeted more than anywhere else in the country.

A one-bedroom apartment in Houston had a $1,050 monthly rent price in August, down 14.6 percent since this time last year. Two-bedroom units were 5.4 percent cheaper than they were a year ago and now sit at $1,400 per month.

The reports findings show a similar pattern across Texas' biggest metros as "elevated multifamily supply" was "absorbed through the boom years." Renters currently have the advantageous opportunity to negotiate lower rent from their landlords, according to Zumper CEO Shawn Mullahy.

"Texas is showing exactly what happens when supply materially outruns demand," Mullahy said. "Austin, Houston and Dallas added enormous amounts of inventory, and renters now have leverage because owners are competing to fill it. That won’t reverse until enough of that supply is absorbed."

For comparison, Zumper's National Rent Index for August 2026 found the median one-bedroom rent fell 0.1 percent year-over-year to $1,515, while two-bedroom rent increased 0.5 percent to $1,907

Rent prices across Texas
Austin tops the U.S. with the steepest decline in both one- and two-bedroom rent prices in August. A one-bedroom unit in Texas' capital city had a $1,260 monthly price, down 16.6 percent from August 2025. Rent for a two-bedroom unit declined even further, by 19.1 percent, to $1,610 per month.

One-bedroom apartments in Dallas weren't far behind. Rent for a single-bedroom unit dipped 13 percent year-over-year to $1,270, and the price for a two-bedroom unit fell 13.4 percent to $1,810.

Elsewhere in the North Texas region, rent prices for a one-bedroom unit in Plano have dipped 7.1 percent since last year to $1,310. Single-bedroom units in Irving are renting for $1,210 a month, or 4.7 percent lower than they were the year before.

In Fort Worth and Arlington, one-bedroom units had a monthly asking price of $1,160 and $1,080 in August. Arlington's one-bedroom rent price is unchanged from 2025, and Fort Worth's is down 3.3 percent.

This is how much it cost for a two-bedroom unit across DFW in August, compared to the previous year:

Plano: $1,920 per month, down 3.5 percent
Irving: $1,620 per month, down 4.7 percent
Fort Worth: $1,530 per month, down 5.5 percent
Arlington: $1,460 per month, down 2.8 percent

In San Antonio, single-bedroom rent prices fell 8.6 percent to $960 per month, and two-bedroom rent declined by 4.5 percent to $1,260.

apartments housing real estate rent rent prices zumper houston