Austin's "Silicon Hills" tech base clusters in a few distinct spots worth mapping before picking a neighborhood. Tesla's Gigafactory Texas sits in unincorporated southeast Travis County near Del Valle, close to the airport. Apple's roughly 133-acre North Austin campus is near the Domain/Parmer Lane corridor in far north Austin. Dell Technologies is headquartered in Round Rock, having moved there in the late 1990s after founding in Austin in 1984. Samsung's newest, largest semiconductor fabs are in Taylor, Williamson County, just northeast of the core metro (a roughly $17 billion-plus investment; Samsung's original Austin fab remains in north Austin). University of Texas at Austin — founded 1883, roughly 55,000 students as of fall 2025 — anchors Downtown/central Austin as an employer in its own right.
New Texas residents have 90 days from moving to the state to get a Texas driver's license through the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) — confirmed directly by both DPS and the Texas DMV. A valid, unexpired out-of-state license remains usable for driving during that window.
New residents have 30 days from moving to Texas to register an out-of-state vehicle, through the county tax assessor-collector's office. A related but separate $90 "new resident tax" is due within that same 30-day window when titling the vehicle (Texas Comptroller Pub. 96-254); miss the window and standard motor-vehicle-use tax applies instead. Texas also changed its inspection rules recently: under House Bill 3297, effective January 1, 2025, non-commercial vehicles no longer require a physical annual safety inspection before registration — replaced by a smaller "inspection program replacement fee" ($7.50 standard, $16.75 for new vehicles covering two years) paid at registration instead. Commercial vehicles are unaffected.
Separately from the safety-inspection change above, Texas still requires annual emissions testing in specific counties before registration or renewal — and Travis and Williamson counties are both on that list, part of the "Austin Area" enhanced-inspection program in place since September 2005, per the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Hays, Bastrop, and Caldwell counties are not on TCEQ's current emissions-county list. Net effect: the old comprehensive safety sticker is gone statewide, but an annual emissions test remains a real, recurring step for anyone registering a vehicle in Travis or Williamson County.
Texas requires voter registration 30 days before an election, per the Texas Secretary of State's official election calendar — and Texas does not offer same-day registration, a genuine contrast with some other states. Confirm the current-cycle exact deadline directly with the Secretary of State before an upcoming election, since calendar dates shift year to year.
Texas has no state individual income tax, and the prohibition has real teeth: Texas Proposition 4 (2019), approved by voters that November, amended the state constitution to require any future state income tax to clear a statewide voter referendum, not just legislative action — building on a similar 1993 voter-approved provision. As of 2026, Texas remains one of nine U.S. states with no individual income tax. The honest tradeoff worth knowing: Texas leans more heavily on property tax than most states as a result — property taxes make up roughly 40.7% of Texas's total state-and-local tax revenue, against a 28.9% national average, and Texas's effective property-tax rate on owner-occupied housing (roughly 1.36–1.40%) runs above the national norm, per Tax Foundation and Kiplinger's 2026 state tax data. This pattern is widely understood as a tradeoff for having no income tax, though no single government source states it as a direct causal formula — see our property tax guide for the mechanics.
The driver's-license, registration, and voter-registration deadlines in Sections 2, 3, and 5 are set by state law and don't change often, though Texas's 2025 inspection-rule overhaul (Section 3) and the emissions-county list (Section 4) are exactly the kind of thing worth re-checking periodically. The income-tax framing in Section 6 references 2026 Tax Foundation and Kiplinger data that updates annually. If you spot something on this page that's changed, or notice a broken link, we'd like to know — see our contact information.