El Paso, Texas hotel market

A decline that mostly did not happen

Sum the raw filings and El Paso looks like the worst hotel market in Texas: $263.7M in the trailing twelve months against $317.6M the year before, down 17%. Nearly all of that is one row. The Courtyard El Paso Airport filed $50.8M for September 2024, against a typical month around $300k, an impossible figure for a 90-room hotel that can only be an amended-filing lump. It sits in the prior-year window, so it makes the comparison year look enormous and the current year look like a collapse. The growth rate shown above nets flagged lumps out of both windows and reads minus 2.7%.

The calendar years tell it cleanly: $273.3M in 2023, a printed $323.4M in 2024 that is about $273M without the artifact, then $252.0M in 2025. So the real story is a decline of roughly 8% in 2025, not 17%. And it has already turned: January through May 2026 came in at $114.5M, up 11% on the same months of 2025, with April up 23% and May up 35%. The market's momentum right now is the opposite of its raw print.

The border demand cycle, in filings

El Paso's hotels reported $212.0M in 2019. After the pandemic collapse to $141.5M, revenue did not just recover, it stepped up to a plateau far above the old baseline: $250.6M in 2021, $255.8M in 2022, $273.3M in 2023. Those were the years the border dominated the city's economy: Border Patrol encounters in the El Paso sector hit forty-year records in late 2022, the city declared itself at a breaking point in 2023, and government agencies, NGOs and National Guard deployments block-booked rooms for months at a time.

In 2025 that engine stopped. Daily crossings in the sector fell from about 2,700 at the 2023 peak to about 60, and the shelter and billeting demand went with them. The filings show exactly where it came out: the extended-stay and budget tier, the product long-stay contracts book. The Hawthorn Suites is down 42.8%, the Staybridge Suites 31.5%, the Holiday Inn Sunland Park 22.0%, the Chase Suite Hotel 19.2%. Meanwhile the properties least exposed to contract demand held or grew: Hotel Paso del Norte, the market's biggest earner, is up 4.8% to $19.7M, and the restored Plaza Hotel Pioneer Park is up 10.9%. That split, not the citywide average, is the real map of this market.

Sources: KFOX: El Paso sector crossings fall from 2,700 a day to about 60 · El Paso Matters: the 2023 surge and shelter strain

What Washington gives

The 2026 recovery has a plausible engine, and it is federal. In early 2025 the Army made Fort Bliss the headquarters of Joint Task Force - Southern Border, brought in hundreds of active-duty personnel and a Stryker fleet, and established a National Defense Area along the boundary. In August 2025, Camp East Montana opened on Bliss land: a detention facility built under a contract of roughly $1.2 billion with a planned capacity of 5,000, one of the largest in the country, with a new operating contractor taking over in March 2026. The filings cannot say who sleeps in which room, but construction crews, contractors and rotating personnel are exactly the demand a buildout of that scale generates, and the recovery's strongest months line up with it.

The caution is the same as the story: the GAO found the camp holding about 1,600 detainees against its 5,000-bed plan in early 2026 and flagged the waste, and El Paso's congressional delegation has called for closure. Demand that arrived by executive decision can leave the same way.

The rest of the demand picture is quieter. Short-term rentals took $34.3M in the trailing year, an 11.5% share, up from 9.1% in 2022, growth that says more about the hotel side's decline than a rental boom. Supply is nearly flat: 111 filing locations, and the notable additions are a new Hampton Inn & Suites on the west side with $3.7M in its first full year and a Best Western Plus at $2.7M.

Sources: Stars and Stripes: the National Defense Area as an extension of Fort Bliss · Spectrum News: the Fort Bliss detention facility opens · PBS: the $1.2 billion Army contract behind the camp · GAO: waste and performance issues at Camp East Montana · Fort Bliss: supporting the southern border mission

The buyer's read, and the data notes

Underwrite El Paso on its permanent layers: Fort Bliss, cross-border commerce, a genuinely improving downtown. The 2021 to 2024 plateau was policy demand, and so is a meaningful slice of the 2026 sprint; neither is a baseline. The asset-level evidence favors full-service downtown and leisure-adjacent product, which grew straight through the wind-down, over commodity extended-stay, which is still finding its post-boom floor and where distressed sellers are most likely to surface. The single biggest variable to watch is Camp East Montana: expansion toward its planned capacity would extend the run, closure would take the swing demand with it.

Data notes: two flagged filings distort raw comparisons, the Courtyard El Paso Airport's September 2024 month ($50.8M against a typical $300k) in the prior window and the Embassy Suites' August 2025 month (about $6M of excess) in the current one; the growth rate shown above excludes both, raw sums do not. Separately, one El Paso permit files a registry room count roughly a hundred times the size of the building. Room totals and the RevPAR figure above use the count that same address filed before it re-registered, which is why El Paso now reads about 10,600 rooms rather than the 29,000 the raw registry implies. All figures are self-reported state tax filings, unaudited, and restated when operators amend.