Why Hill Country Land Commands a Premium

Land in Texas’s Austin-Waco-Hill Country submarket — TRERC’s Region 7, not Region 6 — sold for $7,911 an acre in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 8.15% year-over-year and about 52% above the $5,214 statewide average, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center. The premium widened sharply in late 2025 after two flat years.

How much of a premium does Hill Country land actually command?

Region 7 has traded at a sustained premium over the Texas statewide average for years, and that gap grew wider through 2025 as the region broke out of a two-year holding pattern. Each of the last two quarters of 2025 set a new nominal price record for the region.

Source: TRERC’s Texas Rural Land Markets quarterly reports, first through fourth quarter 2025.

By the fourth quarter, according to TRERC’s report, the $7,911 figure was “a new high for this region,” matching the same language it used for the third quarter’s $7,704 mark just three months earlier. The acceleration is the story here: growth went from 1.32% in the first quarter to 8.15% by the fourth, even as the statewide rate rose more gradually.

What’s actually driving the premium — and is it TRERC’s Region 6 or Region 7?

It’s Region 7, and getting the number right matters because the two regions have posted very different numbers. TRERC names Region 6 “South Texas,” which sold for $6,107 per acre in the fourth quarter of 2025, up a comparatively modest 4.14% year-over-year — a real, respectable gain, but nowhere near Region 7’s $7,911 and 8.15%. A sibling AMM Land Sales article on West Texas’s Region 3 land value spike covers a third, distinct submarket that isn’t the Hill Country at all.

Source: TRERC’s fourth-quarter 2025 report, which breaks out all seven of its rural land market regions.

Unlike West Texas, where TRERC has explicitly pointed to data center and AI infrastructure demand clustering around Abilene, the center’s Region 7 reports don’t name a single catalyst. Its quarterly write-ups for Austin-Waco-Hill Country stick mostly to price mechanics — noting new highs, describing the market as “moving sideways” earlier in the year, or flagging that “deflated,” inflation-adjusted price had lagged nominal price. The more defensible explanation is structural rather than event-driven: sustained in-migration to the Austin metro area colliding with a fixed supply of Hill Country acreage. The Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos metro area — which overlaps heavily with Region 7 — added 267,251 residents between 2020 and 2024, reaching an estimated 2.55 million people and becoming the 25th-most-populous metro in the country, according to Census Bureau estimates reported by Community Impact. Of that growth, roughly 204,000 people came from domestic and international migration rather than births, per the same Census data — people who need somewhere to live, and who compete for land in the counties ringing Austin.

That’s a different kind of demand than a single announced project. It’s slower-moving, harder to point to in a press release, and it shows up in TRERC’s numbers as a gradual widening of the region’s premium rather than a sudden spike tied to one deal. It also shows up over a longer horizon than any single quarter: according to TRERC’s second-quarter 2025 report, Region 7’s five-year annualized growth rate stood at 12.36%, well above the 10.73% five-year annualized rate TRERC calculated statewide as of the fourth quarter. Even during the flattest stretch of 2025, the region had still compounded faster than the rest of Texas over the preceding half-decade — evidence that the premium predates 2025’s acceleration rather than being created by it.

Did prices rise steadily all year, or did something change partway through?

Something changed, and it happened mid-year. TRERC’s first-quarter 2025 report described Region 7 bluntly: “Price has held in the $7,100-$7,450 range since the end of 2022,” and “the market for rural land in this Region seems to be moving sideways, basically flat or in a holding pattern.” By the second quarter, the report noted price had actually “slipped YoY by 2.09 percent,” warning that “price is losing ground relative to inflation over the last year and a half” even as the nominal five-year annualized growth rate held at 12.36%.

That flat, even slightly negative, stretch reversed hard in the back half of the year: according to TRERC’s data, third-quarter price growth jumped to 3.40% year-over-year and a new nominal high, and fourth-quarter growth more than doubled that to 8.15%. A buyer or seller who checked TRERC’s numbers only in the spring of 2025 would have seen a market “moving sideways.” Anyone checking by year-end saw consecutive record prices and the fastest year-over-year growth the region posted all year. That swing is a useful reminder that a regional figure is a snapshot, not a guarantee — a comparable sale from six months earlier can already be stale in a market moving this fast.

Is the premium uniform across the Hill Country, or concentrated in certain counties?

It’s concentrated, though TRERC’s regional figure doesn’t break out individual counties. Region 7 spans a wide area from the Austin metro core — Travis, Williamson, and Hays Counties — out into more rural Hill Country counties like Blanco, where land use, water access, and distance from Austin’s job centers vary enormously from one end of the region to the other. TRERC’s $7,911 figure is a regional median across all of that, meaning a tract close to the Austin metro’s edge, where population growth and development pressure are most direct, likely commands a different price than acreage deeper into the Hill Country bought mainly for recreation or a second home.

That’s consistent with how county assessed value works generally in Texas: appraisal districts value land based on actual sales in that specific area, not a statewide or even regional average. A landowner trying to estimate what their own parcel is worth should treat TRERC’s Region 7 number as a starting point for research, not a plug-in figure — the price per acre that applies to a specific tract depends on its county, its access, its water, and recent local sales far more than it depends on the regional median.

The Austin metro’s own footprint reinforces that unevenness. The population growth driving Region 7’s premium is concentrated in the metro core counties — Travis, Williamson, and Hays — that make up most of the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos area counted in the Census Bureau’s 267,251-resident estimate. Blanco County, further out in the Hill Country proper, isn’t part of that fast-growing metro core in the same way — its land market runs more on recreational and second-home demand than on commuter growth. Lumping both kinds of county into one regional median is useful for spotting a trend, but it flattens real differences a buyer or seller needs to account for.

How does the Hill Country premium compare with statewide Texas land value trends?

It’s part of a broader pattern of land appreciation, but the Hill Country is outrunning it. Statewide, Texas farm real estate value averaged $2,970 per acre in 2025, up 6.1% from the year before, according to the USDA NASS Land Values 2025 Summary released in August 2025 — a figure that blends cropland, pastureland, and rangeland across the entire state, including regions far cheaper than the Hill Country. TRERC’s own statewide rural land figure, which is transaction-based rather than a survey estimate, put the four-quarter statewide price at $5,214 per acre by the end of 2025, up 6.56% year-over-year, with the five-year annualized statewide growth rate at 10.73%. Region 7’s 8.15% fourth-quarter growth outpaced both of those broader benchmarks, and its $7,911 price sits well above any statewide average, whether measured by USDA’s farmland survey or TRERC’s own transaction data.

Will the Hill Country premium keep growing?

It’s genuinely uncertain, and Region 7’s own 2025 pattern is the best evidence why. The region spent the first half of the year essentially flat, even losing ground to inflation, before accelerating sharply in the second half. According to TRERC’s own statewide forecast, the outlook shifted over the course of 2025: its first-quarter report predicted a modest nominal price decline over the following year, but by the third and fourth quarters, its most current reports, the model had flipped to predicting a modest statewide increase instead. The center also repeatedly notes that overall transaction volume statewide remains well below pre-2020 levels, meaning fewer total sales are setting these record per-acre prices than were setting prices five or six years ago. A landowner deciding whether to sell now or wait is betting on whether Austin-area population growth and Hill Country land scarcity keep pushing the region’s median higher, or whether the fourth quarter’s 8.15% jump turns out to be a catch-up spike after two flat years rather than the start of a new, faster trend.

What should a Hill Country landowner do with this data?

Use the regional number as context, not as an appraisal. If a parcel sits close to Travis, Williamson, or Hays County’s growth corridors, TRERC’s Region 7 trend line is a reasonable signal that demand has strengthened. If it sits farther out in the Hill Country, local factors — road access, water, whether the land is entitled or raw acreage — will matter more than the regional median.

Selling land in a market like this often means comparing offers from very different kinds of buyers — local ranchers, developers, brokers, and companies that buy land directly without listing it. AMM Land Sales makes cash offers on rural homesites and recreational land directly to owners, including across the Texas Hill Country, and pays closing costs on any deal it closes; it isn’t a licensed brokerage and doesn’t represent a seller’s interests, so getting more than one number is worth the time before deciding what a specific tract is actually worth. For more on how regional land values are tracked and reported, see the what land is worth guide.