Since the pandemic, Californians have been moving to Texas looking for more job opportunities, cheaper housing, and a lower cost of living.

Texas can look very attractive, especially when you compare housing prices, taxes, and everyday expenses with California. But there are also some disadvantages that people do not always consider before making the move.

In this article, we are going to enumerate the top three things you will probably love about moving from California to Texas, and the top three you probably won’t.

Three Things You Will Love

1. The House

This is the whole reason most people make the call, and the gap is not subtle. The median sale price in Santa Clarita was around $775,000 in the first quarter of this year, and Los Angeles County as a whole was $870,000. In Houston, the median is about $350,000. Dallas is higher at roughly $499,000, but that is still well under what a comparable house costs in the SCV.

What surprises people more than the price is the square footage. The median Houston sale works out to about $181 per square foot. In Santa Clarita, it is closer to $427. You are not just paying less, you are getting a bigger house, usually newer, usually with a yard, and in a lot of cases with a pool that is not a luxury item.

2. What It Costs to Run Your Life Day to Day

Gas is the first thing you notice. On August 3 of this year, AAA had California at $5.66 a gallon, the highest in the country, and Texas at $3.60, the lowest. That is two dollars a gallon. If your household drives 25,000 miles a year between two cars at 25 miles per gallon, that difference is around $2,000 a year that simply stops leaving your account.

Electricity comes second. Southern California Edison averages about 34 cents per kWh, while a Houston household that shops carefully lands somewhere around 11 to 15 cents all in. Texas has a deregulated electricity market in most of the state, meaning dozens of electricity providers compete for customers. The competition is extremely aggressive. Despite what you may sometimes see in the news about the Texas grid, this competition and the growth of renewable generation have helped push retail electricity offers significantly lower compared with where they were last year.

3. No State Income Tax

California has one of the highest state income tax rates in the country, with a top marginal rate of 13.3%. Texas has none at all, which can represent thousands of dollars a year in savings, and considerably more for higher earners. One caveat that catches people: if you move mid-year, you will file a part-year California return, so talk to a CPA before you sell anything with a capital gain attached.

Three Things Nobody Warns You About

1. Property Tax and Homeowners Insurance

Everyone knows Texas property taxes are high. The statewide effective rate is around 1.6%, but that average hides what you will actually pay in the suburbs people move to. Once you stack the school district, the county, the city, and a MUD, plenty of newer neighborhoods around Houston and Dallas run past 3%. California averages about 0.7%. On a $500,000 house, 3% is $15,000 a year in property taxes alone.

Insurance makes it worse. The Texas Department of Insurance puts the average annual homeowners premium at $3,291 in 2024, up from $1,782 in 2015. Most Texas policies also carry a separate wind and hail deductible set as a percentage of your dwelling coverage instead of a flat dollar amount, so a hailstorm can cost you thousands before coverage starts.

2. The Distance to Anything With Elevation

California has nine national parks. Texas has two, and neither one is close. Big Bend is most of a day’s drive from Houston. Guadalupe Mountains is farther. There is no equivalent of getting in the car after work and being in the Angeles National Forest in forty minutes.

The Gulf Coast is warm and swimmable, but it is brown water and flat sand, and it is not the Pacific. Summer runs from May through September, and July afternoons in Houston at 96 degrees with 70% humidity are not a hiking climate. People here plan outdoor life around November through April, which is genuinely pleasant, and then hide indoors for the rest.

3. Certain Careers and Industries Are Still Unmatched

If your work sits deep inside Silicon Valley tech and venture capital, entertainment, biotech, aerospace, or a specialized research field, California still has depth that Texas cannot match. Austin has changed this a lot in the last decade, and Houston has real strength in energy and medicine, but the density of employers, funding, and people who do exactly what you do is not the same. If you are senior enough that your next job comes from your network rather than a job board, that thinner network is a real cost, and it is worth thinking through before you list the house.