Texas metro areas map

A metropolitan statistical area is a federal statistical unit, not a government. It is defined by the Office of Management and Budget as an urban core of at least 50,000 people plus every surrounding county tied to that core by commuting. Because the building block is the whole county, Texas metros can look enormous on a map: the El Paso metro includes Hudspeth County, which is mostly empty desert, and the Dallas–Fort Worth metro reaches out to Somervell and Wise counties that are still rural. A smaller urban core, between 10,000 and 50,000 people, produces a micropolitan area instead — Del Rio, Nacogdoches, Big Spring, Paris and Huntsville are among those.

Delineations are revised every few years as commuting patterns shift, so a county can join or leave a metro between censuses. The populations above are the 2020 census counts for the areas as delineated at that time.

Draw a line from Dallas–Fort Worth down I-35 to San Antonio, across I-10 to Houston, and back up I-45 to Dallas, and you have enclosed about two-thirds of the state's population in roughly a tenth of its land. Austin sits inside the western leg and is the fastest-growing corner of it. The I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio has effectively filled in — San Marcos, New Braunfels and Kyle sit between two metros that are only 80 miles apart — and the two are sometimes treated as a single combined statistical area.

Outside the triangle, the growth is concentrated on the border and in the oilfield. The McAllen and Brownsville metros in the Rio Grande Valley together hold more than a million people, and the Midland and Odessa metros in the Permian Basin rise and fall with the price of oil. Much of rural West Texas and the Panhandle lost population between 2010 and 2020 while the metros gained.