The Austin Area
The Austin Area is a six-county metropolitan area located in Central Texas centered on the City of Austin—the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 11th-largest city in the United States. The Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), as defined by the Office of Management and Budget, includes Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis, and Williamson counties. It is the 35th largest metropolitan area in the United States, with a population over 2 million people and the 24th largest GDP per Capita as of the 2017 Bureau of Economnic Analysis estimate. The metropolitan area’s largest suburbs are Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, San Marcos and Pflugerville.
Historically buoyed by government activities and education (home to the stage government and the state flagship University of Texas), the Austin Area’s economy has diversified tremendously over the past couple of decades as high-tech firms, particularly related to semiconductors and software, have become important economic pillars. The recent announcements by Apple to invest $1 billion to expand its North Austin campus and the decision by Google to lease nearly 50 floors of downtown office space (enough to hire over 5,000) employees has solidified Austin as a modern-day boomtown.
We include Burnet County in our analysis of the Austin Area given commuter patterns in the region, that the City of Austin’s water supply is entirely supplied from reservoirs in Burnet County, and the likelihood that Burnet will be included in the official MSA post-2020 census. Commonly referred to as Greater Austin, the metropolitan area is situated on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, and borders San Antonio–New Braunfels to the south.