Get to Know Austin
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas and the seat of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. It is the 10th-most populous city in the United States, the fourth-most-populous city in Texas, and the second-most-populous state capital city. The Austin-Round Rock - Georgetown metro area is also the fastest-growing region in the United States*.
As of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 estimate, Austin had a population of 974,447 up from 790,491 at the 2010 census. The city is the cultural and economic center of the Austin–Round Rock-Georgetown metropolitan statistical area, which has an estimated population of 2.2 million. Located in Central Texas within the greater Texas Hill Country, it is home to numerous lakes, rivers, and waterways, including Lady Bird Lake and Lake Travis on the Colorado River, Barton Springs, McKinney Falls, and Lake Walter E. Long. Austin’s mild climate allows you to enjoy outdoor activities virtually year-round. Austin has 300 days of sunshine a year and an average temperature of 71 degrees in November.
In the 1830s, pioneers began to settle the area in central Austin along the Colorado River. The city grew throughout the 19th century and became a center for government and education with the construction of the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas at Austin. By the 1990s it emerged as a center for technology and business. Several Fortune 500 companies have headquarters or regional offices in Austin including, 3M, Amazon.com, Apple Inc., Cisco, Dell Computers, eBay, General Motors, Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle Corporation, PayPal, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and Whole Foods Market. Dell’s worldwide headquarters is in the nearby suburb of Round Rock.
The city’s official slogan promotes Austin as “The Live Music Capital of the World,” a reference to the city’s over 200 live music venues, as well as the long-running PBS TV concert series Austin City Limits. The city also adopted “Silicon Hills” as a nickname in the 1990s due to a rapid influx of technology and development companies. Austin is known as a “clean-air city” for its stringent no-smoking ordinances that apply to all public places and buildings, including restaurants and bars.
The Greater Austin metropolitan statistical area had a gross domestic product (GDP) of $144.9 billion. Austin is a major center for high-tech. Thousands of graduates each year from the engineering and computer science programs at The University of Texas at Austin provide a steady source of employees that help to fuel Austin’s technology and defense industry sectors. The region’s rapid growth led Forbes** to rank the Austin metropolitan area as number one among all big cities for jobs for 2018 in their annual survey ranking the area number one for growing businesses. In 2022, Austin was ranked No. 8 on Forbes’ list of the Best Places for Business and Careers.
