Austin, Texas hotel market

The decline is smaller than it looks

Austin's hotels reported $1.57B of room receipts in the trailing twelve months, 6% below the year before. More than half of that drop is an artifact, not a market move. The LINE Hotel, a 428-room property on Cesar Chavez, filed $40.6M for March 2025 and $25.4M for May 2025; no other month it has filed since the start of 2024 tops $4.6M, and $40.6M over 428 rooms works out to roughly $3,000 a night on every room every night of the month. Both lumps sit in the prior-year comparison window and inflate it by roughly $60M. A second oddity runs the other way: the Omni downtown filed $10.7M for December 2025 against $1.4M the December before, padding the current year by about $9M. Strip both and the market is down about 3%, not 6%. That is what the growth rate at the top of this page now shows: flagged months at five properties are replaced with typical ones, and the rate reads minus 3.3%.

The longer view says flat, not falling. Calendar-year hotel receipts have sat inside a 1% band for three years: $1.64B in 2023, $1.63B in 2024, $1.64B in 2025, all of it about 22% above 2019. October remains the biggest month by a wide margin, over $200M in both 2024 and 2025 on the back of Formula 1 and Austin City Limits, and it held flat year over year. What changed is concentrated somewhere specific.

A hole where the convention center was

The Austin Convention Center closed on April 1, 2025 and was torn down by fall. The $1.6B rebuild nearly doubles rentable space, from 365,000 to 620,000 square feet, but the building does not reopen until late 2028, with events targeted for the 2029 spring festival season. That leaves downtown's convention-anchored hotels holding a four-year gap, and the filings map it precisely.

The Hilton Austin, the 800-room headquarters hotel across Fourth Street from the site, reported $42.6M in trailing receipts against $54.5M the year before, down 21.9%, with single months since the closure down by as much as half. The city saw this coming: reporting on the deal put projected bookings down 25% during the closure, and the council structured up to $38M in loans to carry the hotel through it. The 1,048-room Fairmont next door is down 10.5%. The rest of the blocks around the site read like a gradient of convention dependence: Austin Marriott Downtown down 5.2%, Hyatt Regency down 6.6%, Sheraton at the Capitol down 6.9%, Courtyard Downtown down 7.7%, Kimpton Van Zandt down 7.9%, Hyatt Place Downtown down 8.4%, Hyatt Centric down 9.8%. UT's AT&T Hotel and Conference Center is down 17.9%, the same disease in a different district.

Hotels that do not need the center are fine. The 1,012-room JW Marriott, which carries more than 100,000 square feet of its own meeting space, grew 12.6% to $88.4M and is now the market's largest earner. The Four Seasons is up 3.7%, the Proper up 5.3%, the Westin at the Domain up 2.5%, Omni Barton Creek up 1.5%. SXSW 2026 ran without the center for the first time, compressed to a single week and dispersed into exactly those hotel ballrooms; March 2026 receipts came in about 4% below March 2025 once the filing artifact is removed. The market did not lose Austin demand. It lost the one building that fills city-wide blocks of rooms on weekdays.

Sources: Community Impact: demolition complete, new building opens 2029 · KUT: the redesign, 365k to 620k rentable square feet · CBS Austin: on time and on budget for late 2028 · Austin Monitor: up to $38M in city loans to shield the Hilton · Skift: SXSW 2026 without the convention center · Austin Current: downtown hospitality through the construction

Supply keeps arriving into the gap

336 hotels filed room tax in the trailing year, and registry capacity stands at 37,013 rooms, up 596, about 1.6%, from the year before. Fifty-seven locations filed for the first time, but most of those are rebrands and operator changes rather than new buildings, and the counts treat a re-registered hotel as the same building; the Embassy Suites Arboretum, a decades-old property, simply began filing under a new operator in February 2026. The genuine additions skew select-service and airport: a 117-room Homewood Suites near the airport began filing in July 2025 and has reported about $2.6M since. The marquee opening is still ahead. The 252-room 1 Hotel Austin opens in August 2026 in the 74-story Waterline tower, new luxury inventory landing in the middle of the convention gap. The rebuilt center itself will add no rooms: an earlier plan to put a hotel tower on the site was cut in 2024.

Short-term rentals are a quarter-billion-dollar market here, $249M in the trailing year, 13.7% of citywide lodging revenue, but they are not the moving piece. Measured STR revenue has been flat since 2022 ($252.6M then, $235.5M in 2024, $238.8M in 2025), and the share peaked back in 2021 at 15.4%. Austin's STR story is maturity, not invasion: the first five months of 2026 ran only slightly ahead of 2025's pace.

Sources: Hotel Management: 1 Hotel Austin sets August 2026 debut · Community Impact: hotel tower cut from the center redevelopment

The buyer's read, and the data notes

Austin is the rare soft market where the catalyst has a date. Convention demand is not gone, it is scheduled: the new center opens with nearly double the rentable space, targeting events in early 2029, and the city has publicly kept the project on time and on budget so far. An asset near the site priced on 2025 through 2028 cash flows is a bet on that date, and the city lending its own headquarters hotel up to $38M tells you how real the trough is. Underwrite the gap years on measured post-closure months, June 2025 onward, not on 2024; treat October as the load-bearing month it is, about 13% of annual receipts riding on Formula 1 and ACL; and note which way the risk runs, because large public construction projects slip far more often than they finish early. Away from downtown, the Domain, the resorts and the airport corridor are simply a flat, diversified market with under 2% supply growth.

Data notes: two implausible filed months distort the aggregates. The LINE's March and May 2025 filings inflate the prior-year base by roughly $60M, and the Omni downtown's December 2025 filing pads the current year by about $9M. We suppress both properties' growth rates rather than print numbers we distrust, and the market growth rate shown at the top of this page excludes flagged months at five properties, which is why it reads minus 3.3% rather than the raw minus 6%. All figures are self-reported state tax filings, unaudited, and restated when operators amend.

Sources: KVUE: extended hours keeping demolition on schedule · CBS Austin: on time and on budget for late 2028