Living in Dallas, Texas: Cost of Living, Weather, Jobs, and Utilities

The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro added 123,557 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, second only to Houston among U.S. metros. What a month of living here costs comes down to five things: housing, transportation, utilities, weather, and job location.

The great thing about Texas in general is that there’s no state income tax. Living in Dallas, Texas also means you can choose your electricity provider, so you can shop around and pick plans that avoid big bill swings in the summer.

Here’s everything else you should know before making Dallas your new home.

Dallas anchors a metro of about 8.5 million people across eleven counties, with flat land in every direction and nothing to stop it from growing outward.

Work brings most people to the city. The metro held about 4.35 million nonfarm jobs as of July 2026, and no single sector accounts for more than a quarter of jobs. Texas voters also helped write the ban on a state income tax into Article 8 of the constitution in 2019. Corporate relocations are another reason people move to Dallas, with 21 Fortune 500 headquarters in the region as of 2026.

Other factors attract people to Dallas, including the 1920s bungalows in Lakewood, new construction in Frisco, six major league teams, a downtown arts district, and nonstop flights to 193 domestic and 78 international destinations.

Advantages of living in Dallas include:

• Hiring runs across several industries, so a career change rarely means a move.
• The median house costs less than half what the same money buys in Los Angeles.
• DFW Airport and Dallas Love Field give you two airports.
• The central location puts most of the country within a four-hour flight.

The cons are just as consistent:

• Summers are long, hot, and start earlier than newcomers expect.
• Rush hour on I-35E, US-75, and the LBJ Freeway can double a 20-minute drive.
• A July or August Dallas electric bill often lands at twice the April one.
• Hail season runs March into June, which is why roofs here are often repaired or replaced.

The cost of living in Dallas runs about 2% below the national average overall, but certain categories pull in opposite directions. Housing sits 11% below the average. Utilities sit 12% above.

Dallas housing costs are split between renting and buying. The average apartment rented for $1,592 in August 2026, for 859 square feet. The median home sale price is $475,000. Your neighborhood also affects your housing costs. The same 1,800-square-foot home prices one way in Garland or Irving and another two exits north in Plano.

The mean commute for city residents is over 25 minutes. Gas ran $3.667 a gallon on September 7, 2026. As far as tolls, North Texas went cashless in 2010. Anyone without a TollTag pays the ZipCash rate by mail, at double the tag rate.

DART runs 93 miles of light rail, plus the 26-mile Silver Line across 12 cities at $126 a month, which replaces a car only if both ends of your commute sit near a station.

Groceries run 1% below the national average. Healthcare runs 4% above, and entertainment and personal services run 6% above.

Housing is the main cost of living driver in Dallas. Over the three months ending July 2026, the median sale price was $475,000 in Dallas, $430,000 in Chicago, $900,000 in New York, and $1.1 million in Los Angeles. The comparison reverses closer to home. Dallas sits above Chicago at $430,000 and Houston at $360,000.

Dallas weather drives a household expense that most cities treat as minor. The averages recorded at DFW Airport show why.

Summer settles in around June and holds through September, with normal daily highs at DFW in the low 90s in June and about 96 degrees in July and August. [Triple-digit heat is routine rather than exceptional, and the airport averages 20.2 days a year at or above 100. Midsummer lows only fall to about 76 degrees, so houses get little chance to shed heat overnight.

Winter is short and mild, with normal January highs at DFW near 56.5 degrees and lows around 36.1, though temperatures do dip below freezing. Normal annual snowfall is 1.6 inches, and the National Weather Service notes that wintry precipitation occurs every winter while many seasons end with little or no measurable snow. The bigger risk to households is ice, since freezing rain on roads and power lines is what closes schools and causes outages.

North Texas sits in an active corridor for severe storms. Large hail, damaging winds, flooding, and tornadoes occur nearly every year in the Metroplex, and thunderstorm frequency peaks in spring, one of the two wettest seasons. Winter storms are rarer but arrive as ice. Hail drives North Texas homeowners insurance costs, so ask about roof age and coverage before signing a policy.

Spring and fall are why people put up with August. April brings mild afternoons, and the cooling load drops with them, from roughly 642 cooling degree days in a normal July to about 102 in April. Those are the months the region spends outside, on the Katy Trail, around White Rock Lake, and at the State Fair of Texas from late September into mid-October.

Air conditioning connects weather to your utility bills, and Dallas homes run the A/C about five months a year.

Your air conditioner works to close the gap between the temperature inside your house and the temperature outside. Holding 75 degrees indoors is easy when it’s 85 out and hard when it’s 103, so the system runs more cycles and longer ones.

DFW records about 102 cooling degree days in a normal April against roughly 642 in July, about six times the load. Your kilowatt-hour usage rises as the number of cooling degree days do. Air conditioning accounts for roughly 19% of electricity use in U.S. homes over a full year, and in a Dallas July, it’s usually the largest item on the bill.

Dallas utility costs run about 12% above the national average, the one budget category where the metro sits over the line. Four services make up most of it:

• Electricity: The largest and most variable. You choose your retail provider, and Oncor delivers power to your address.
• Natural gas: Heating, water heaters, and cooking, and the one utility whose bill peaks in January instead of August.
• Water and wastewater: Dallas Water Utilities inside the city limits, with a separate account in every suburb. [22]
• Internet: Several providers serve the metro, with availability varying by street.

Your electricity bill has two main parts. The energy charge is the kilowatt-hours you used multiplied by your plan’s rate, and the delivery charges are Oncor’s. It applies to every address in its territory no matter which retail provider you buy from.

Your energy usage is what changes monthly. Texas residential customers averaged 1,096 kilowatt-hours and a monthly bill of $163.72 in 2024. Still, that annual figure smooths out a summer peak and a mild spring, which can vary drastically on a Dallas electric bill.

Most of Texas is deregulated, so the company that delivers your power and the company that sells it to you are two different businesses. Oncor maintains the poles and wires, and dozens of Dallas electricity providers compete for the contract. That competition is why a state site called Power to Choose exists, and why your neighbor can pay a different rate for identical service. You can see what’s available on the Dallas electricity rates page.

Once you have an address, you can start comparing energy plans. Here’s how Texas’ electricity market works and how to choose a plan.

Three parties make sure your home has power. Retail electric providers sell you the electricity and send the bill. Oncor physically delivers the power to your home and repairs the lines after a storm. ERCOT runs the grid that connects them. Oncor is the wires company. It doesn’t sell you electricity, set your rate or send your bill—but it owns the poles and the meter, and you don’t get to pick it. Your address does. So you call the utility about an outage and your provider about a rate.

Learn more about REPs vs. utility companies.

The Public Utility Commission requires an Electricity Facts Label on every retail offer. Read it before you enroll, and check these four things:

• Rate type, which the label states as fixed or variable.
• Contract length in months, plus the cancellation fee and the rate the account defaults to at expiration.
• The average price at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kilowatt-hours, since the headline rate assumes one of those three.
• Renewable content, stated as a percentage of the mix.

A fixed-rate contract keeps your electricity rates constant for 12, 24, or 36 months, making monthly budgeting predictable. Kilowatt-hour usage still climbs in August, so the bill rises with it, but the multiplier does not. ERCOT prices the wholesale market in real time, and a fixed term helps prevent bill swings. It also lets you plan the cooling season based on last year’s usage rather than guessing.

Dallas jobs are why most people read a relocation guide about the metro in the first place. It held about 4.35 million nonfarm jobs as of July 2026, with unemployment at 4.6%.

No single sector runs the market, which helps keep a downturn in one from emptying the metro. As of July 2026:

• Trade, transportation, and utilities: about 895,000 jobs, the metro’s largest supersector
• Professional and business services: about 805,000 jobs, up 3% year over year
• Education and health services: about 531,000 jobs
• Government: about 465,000 jobs, federal, state, and local
• Leisure and hospitality: about 450,000 jobs, also up 3%
• Manufacturing: about 314,000 jobs, down slightly and one of three supersectors that shed jobs.

Technology, finance, telecommunications, and logistics run through several of those categories rather than sitting in their own, since a software job at a bank counts under finance and a network engineer at a carrier counts under information.

Corporate headquarters concentrate here, and the Dallas Regional Chamber names Texas Instruments, AT&T, American Airlines, Kimberly-Clark, Toyota, and McKesson among the region’s major companies. Airlines are their own category, with American based in Fort Worth and Southwest at Dallas Love Field, and healthcare is the other big one, anchored by Baylor Scott and White, Texas Health Resources, and Children’s Health.

Remote and hybrid roles are easy to find here, partly because so many national companies keep a Dallas office. Coworking space clusters in Uptown, Richardson, and the Legacy area of Plano. One thing to plan for: a house with someone in it at 2 p.m. runs the air conditioner all afternoon, and that lands on the July bill.

Where people land mostly depends on life stage and commute.

Uptown and downtown are the most walkable part of the region, and the M-Line heritage streetcar runs its 4.6 miles into downtown free of charge. Deep Ellum trades that for live music and converted warehouse lofts. Downtown itself has been turning older office towers into apartments, which is how a business district ends up with grocery stores.

Frisco built most of its housing after 2000 and priced the school districts into it. McKinney keeps a historic courthouse square and prices under Frisco. Flower Mound sits on the north shore of Grapevine Lake, closer to DFW Airport than to downtown Dallas.

Garland, Mesquite, and Grand Prairie price below the metro average, mostly because the houses are older and the lots are bigger. Garland has the added advantage of sitting on the DART rail line, which matters if you’d rather run one car than two.

Highland Park and University Park, the two independent cities surrounded by Dallas, have some of the region’s most expensive real estate, with Southlake near the airport as the northern equivalent.

Power, internet, water, and trash service each come from a different company in Dallas.

Every Dallas address has an ESI ID, the identifier that ties a street address to the grid. You’ll need it when you enroll in an energy plan. Compare plans before moving day rather than after, then pick your provider. Service can start as soon as the next business day, but confirm with your energy provider.

Fiber, cable, and fixed wireless boundaries follow buildout history rather than city lines. A 2015 subdivision may have fiber, while a 1960s street two miles away runs copper. Multifamily buildings often carry a bulk agreement named in the lease.

Inside the Dallas city limits, Dallas Water Utilities handles water, wastewater, and stormwater, and you open the account directly with the city, while suburban cities run their own systems. Trash and recycling are municipal too, and in most cities the charge lands on the water bill.

Four things determine what you’ll actually pay:

• Home size, since more square footage means more air to cool.
• Seasonality, with July and August far above your spring baseline.
• Occupancy, since more people means more doors opening and more laundry.
• Energy efficiency, meaning insulation, windows, ducts, and HVAC age.

You can’t change the forecast, but a Dallas house has more room for improvement than most because much of the cooling load comes through the attic and west-facing walls.

North Texas attics pass 130 degrees on a July afternoon, and most houses run their supply ducts through that space. A duct blaster test measures the leakage. West-facing glass is the second path, peaking between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Climb up to your attic and check the tops of the joists. If you can see them, you have somewhere around six inches of insulation. The current standard for this climate is closer to fourteen inches for blown cellulose and 16-20 inches for blown fiberglass.

Check the edges of the insulation as well. Insulation shoved against the soffit vents where the roof meets the wall cuts off the airflow the attic needs to shed heat.

A smart thermostat lets the house drift to 80 degrees while nobody’s home and brings it back to 76 before you walk in. Another useful feature is the runtime report, since most models show how many hours the system ran yesterday compared with last week, so you can adjust your habits if needed.

Federal efficiency minimums for central air conditioners rose on January 1, 2015 and again on January 1, 2023, when the Southeast minimum became SEER2 14.3. This means the manufacture date stamped on the outdoor unit can give you an idea of how efficient it is. Condition accounts for the rest. A condenser coil packed with grass clippings or cottonwood sheds less heat, and a filter rated for 90 days runs out early in a Dallas summer.

Find your contract end date and set a reminder 60 days out because a lapsed contract rolls onto a holdover rate. Compare Dallas electricity plans against your own July and August kilowatt-hours, not an annual average.

The answer depends on your heat tolerance, commute tolerance, and housing costs where you’re coming from.

The metro added 123,557 people in a year, and they come for different reasons. Professionals find a market deep enough that switching employers rarely means switching cities. Families follow the northern districts. Entrepreneurs come for the tax treatment. Remote workers pick on price, since the commute no longer constrains the map.

If you don’t tolerate heat well, take the summer seriously before you commit, because five months of air conditioning is a real lifestyle change. If you rely on public transit, study the map first, since DART’s 12 cities and 93 miles of rail leave most of the metro car dependent. And if you want a walkable historic neighborhood, Dallas has pockets of that but is fundamentally spread out.

Most people who move to Dallas are trading weather for money. The jobs are here, housing costs less than it does in most large metros, and the state takes nothing out of your paycheck. In exchange, you run the air conditioning from May through September and drive everywhere. If that trade works for you, one line on the budget is still open. Your mortgage is fixed the day you close, and the county sets your property tax. Electricity is set by whichever retailer you signed with, and you can change that.

When you move to Dallas, you’ll need to plan for more than just housing and work. Texas has a competitive electricity market, so you can compare providers and pick a plan that fits your usage and budget, instead of just accepting what’s already set up. With the right plan, living in Dallas doesn’t have to mean high utility bills.

Compare Dallas Electricity Plans

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