By Austin Senior Advisor Care Team · July 8, 2026
Round Rock, Georgetown, Cedar Park and Leander now hold roughly 103,000 residents 65 and older, a 23.6 percent jump since 2020. Here is what that growth does to availability, to price, and to the drive time that matters most.
The number that explains the building boom
Travis County still has more seniors than any other county in the metro. Recent Census estimates put its population near 1,389,670 with about 11.6 percent aged 65 and over, roughly 161,000 people. That is the largest raw count in Central Texas and it is not close.
But the growth is happening north. Williamson County sits at roughly 752,827 residents with about 13.7 percent aged 65 and over, approximately 103,000 seniors, and that older population has grown about 23.6 percent since 2020. Travis grew about 7.7 percent over the same stretch. Hays County, to the south, grew about 26.3 percent off a smaller base of roughly 41,000 seniors.
So Williamson has both the second-largest senior population in the metro and one of the fastest growth rates, which is a rare combination. Developers read those two numbers together. A county that is simultaneously big and accelerating is where capital goes.
Metro-wide, the Austin area now has on the order of 305,000 residents aged 65 and over. A meaningful and rising share of them live north of the Travis County line.
Land economics, not demographics, decided where the buildings went
Demographics explain why the demand exists. They do not explain why the buildings clustered in Round Rock, Georgetown, Cedar Park and Leander instead of central Austin.
That was land. A licensed assisted living community needs a single-story or low-rise footprint, surface parking, secured outdoor courtyards, a commercial kitchen, and enough setback to satisfy Life Safety Code egress requirements. Those are land-hungry buildings. Assembling that footprint inside Austin's urban core competes directly with multifamily and commercial development at prices that make the math impossible.
Along the I-35 and 183A corridors north of the county line, the same footprint was available at a fraction of the cost, on parcels that could be permitted faster. That is why so much of the metro's newest senior housing inventory carries a Williamson County address.
The consequence for families is structural rather than incidental. When you search the Austin metro for assisted living or memory care, a disproportionate share of what looks new, and what has open apartments, will be twenty to thirty-five miles from the neighborhoods where the residents actually spent their lives.
The Sun City effect
Georgetown deserves its own paragraph. Sun City Texas, the Del Webb age-restricted community there, sits on approximately 5,000 acres and had built somewhere in the range of 7,500 to 8,500 homes of a planned 10,000 as of recent reporting, with a population of roughly 15,700 residents as of 2021. Figures vary by source and by year, so treat all of them as approximate.
A community of that size does something no marketing plan can replicate. It concentrates tens of thousands of active adults who moved to Georgetown healthy in their sixties, and who then aged in place for fifteen or twenty years. The residents did not leave. Their needs changed.
That created a locally generated, predictable pipeline of demand for in-home care, adult day programs, assisted living and memory care within a few miles of one zip code cluster. Service providers followed it. Home care agencies, therapy practices, and senior-focused medical offices built up around Georgetown for the same reason.
It also means the Georgetown market behaves differently from the rest of the metro. Many families there are not relocating a parent from elsewhere. They are moving someone a few miles from a home they own, and that changes what they prioritize. We cover this in more depth in why there is so much senior housing in Georgetown and Round Rock.
What the growth actually does to availability
The intuitive assumption is that more buildings means more open apartments. That is roughly true for standard assisted living and roughly false for memory care, and the difference comes down to licensing.
In Texas, memory care is not a license type. A community that serves residents with Alzheimer's disease or related dementias in a dedicated unit must hold an Alzheimer's certification under 26 TAC 553.27, which requires a Type B license, is verified through an on-site health and Life Safety Code inspection, and caps the number of residents the certified unit may serve. Certified capacity does not expand simply because a new building opened.
So in Williamson County you will often find reasonable choice in general assisted living and a much thinner market in certified memory care, particularly for residents with higher behavioral needs. Families frequently discover this after they have already toured four buildings that used the word memory care in their marketing.
Verify certification yourself rather than taking the tour's word for it. HHSC's TULIP system at tulip.hhs.texas.gov shows current license status and certifications. The legacy search at apps.hhs.texas.gov/ltcsearch gives you inspection and deficiency history. A building can be licensed, well-reviewed, and still not certified to keep your parent as dementia progresses.
One more availability wrinkle: newer buildings in lease-up sometimes offer concessions to fill apartments. Those are real savings, but a concession that expires in twelve months against a rate that escalates annually is a short-term discount on a long-term commitment. Ask for the rate increase history before you take the incentive.
Price: what new inventory does and does not change
We do not publish an Austin-specific monthly figure for assisted living, and you should be skeptical of any site that does. The 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey, released March 2, 2026 with rates collected between July and November 2025, publishes state medians only. For Texas, assisted living came in at $5,666 a month, about $67,992 a year, against a national median of $6,200. The Austin metro runs above the Texas median. There is no credible published number for how far above, and the specific Austin figures circulating online do not trace to a primary source.
New supply in Williamson County has not made senior care cheap there. Newer buildings are generally purpose-built, amenity-heavy, and financed at current construction costs, which tends to place them at or above prevailing metro rates rather than below. What new supply has done is create more negotiating room and more real choice, which is worth something different from a discount.
The other reason a Williamson County address does not automatically mean a lower bill: care level pricing. Base rent is only part of the number. The care fee is set by the community's own assessment tool, which Texas does not standardize, and it moves independently of geography. Two buildings twelve miles apart can quote similar rent and differ by hundreds of dollars once care is priced.
For veterans, and Williamson County has approximately 38,936 of them, the more consequential number may be VA Aid and Attendance. Effective December 1, 2025, the maximum annual benefit is $29,093 for a veteran with no dependents, roughly $2,424 a month, and $18,697 for a surviving spouse, roughly $1,558 a month. The VA pays the difference between countable income and the maximum, and unreimbursed medical expenses including assisted living and home care reduce countable income. Details are in the Aid and Attendance guide.
The tradeoff nobody prices: distance from the specialists
Here is the honest cost of newer inventory further north. Routine medical care is well covered in Williamson County. St. David's HealthCare, an HCA joint venture with more than 180 sites of care, operates hospitals in both Round Rock and Georgetown, and everyday hospitalizations, orthopedic care and emergency visits are handled locally.
Complex and high-acuity care still concentrates in central Austin. The region's Level I trauma center is Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas, 1500 Red River Street, Austin 78701, the Dell Medical School teaching hospital. Ascension Seton Medical Center Austin sits at 1201 W 38th Street and St. David's Medical Center at 919 E 32nd Street, both in the 78705 medical cluster. Baylor Scott and White Medical Center Austin is on the W US Highway 290 service road.
If your parent has an established neurologist, cardiologist, oncologist or movement disorder specialist in central Austin, moving them to Leander or Georgetown means a 45 to 70 minute drive each way for appointments that may recur monthly. Someone has to make that drive, and in practice that someone is usually the adult child who is already doing the most.
Which raises the tradeoff that actually decides outcomes. Proximity to family predicts visit frequency, and visit frequency is the single most reliable protective factor in any care setting. A slightly older building fifteen minutes from your house will almost always produce better care than a beautiful new one forty minutes away, because you will drop in unannounced on a Tuesday.
Run the drive at the hour you would actually make it. Not Sunday at 10am. Weekday, 5:30pm, from your office. If the answer is that you would visit twice a month instead of twice a week, weight that heavily against whatever the new building is offering.
How to work a market that is growing this fast
Search by drive time, not by city name. Draw the radius from wherever the primary family caregiver actually lives and works, then look at what falls inside it. Pull licensing status from TULIP and inspection history from the legacy HHSC search for every building on the list before you tour any of them. You can also start from our city pages for Round Rock, Georgetown, Cedar Park and Leander.
Do not assume assisted living is the only answer. Adult day health care in Texas has a median of about $90 a day, roughly $1,950 a month, versus $5,666 a month for assisted living. AGE of Central Texas runs adult day health programs in both Austin and Round Rock with a nurse on site at all times, and also offers a free early-stage memory loss program, free CaregiverU classes, and free health equipment lending including wheelchairs, walkers and shower benches. Their number is 512-451-4611, and their Austin location is 7640 Guadalupe Street, 78752.
If you are unsure where to start, the Aging and Disability Resource Center of the Capital Area, 855-937-2372, takes calls weekdays 8 to 5 and does not sell placements. The Area Agency on Aging of the Capital Area is 512-916-6062. For a problem inside a licensed facility, the ombudsman is 512-916-6054 or 888-622-9111 option 3, covering Travis, Williamson and Hays among ten counties.
And keep this in the back of your mind about a fast-growing market: some of the buildings competing for your parent opened recently enough that they have limited inspection history to review, and staffing at a community in lease-up looks different at 30 percent occupancy than it does at 90. Ask what the staffing ratio will be when the building is full, on the overnight shift, and get the answer in writing.