Houston's job base is spread across several distinct hubs rather than concentrated in one place, and it's worth mapping before you pick a neighborhood or a county. Downtown Houston holds nine of the metro's 22 Fortune 500 headquarters, mostly energy/midstream companies like Enterprise Products Partners and Kinder Morgan — but not ExxonMobil, which consolidated its headquarters into a new campus in Spring, TX (near The Woodlands) in 2023, and Chevron, which closed its downtown tower in 2024 even as it announced relocating its overall corporate headquarters to Houston from California. The Energy Corridor, adjacent to Katy, is anchored by BP America's onshore/Gulf of Mexico operations headquarters (roughly 5,500 employees) along with ConocoPhillips, Shell, and Citgo. The Texas Medical Center, near neighborhoods like Pearland, is described as the world's largest medical complex — more than 55 million square feet and over 100,000 employees across 60+ member institutions. NASA's Johnson Space Center sits in the Clear Lake City area (technically inside Houston, not League City — see our League City guide for that distinction), employing a mix of civil servants and a larger contractor workforce. Sugar Land hosts Schlumberger's U.S. headquarters plus Fluor Corporation, CVR Energy, and Minute Maid. Pasadena, along the Houston Ship Channel, anchors the region's refining and petrochemical sector, including the Chevron Pasadena Refinery. The Port of Houston is the busiest U.S. port by total tonnage, supporting an estimated 1.89 million jobs statewide per the port's own published figures.
Broadly, Texas markets itself heavily on having no wage income tax statewide (see Section 6) — a genuine, well-documented draw that shapes relocation decisions across this entire metro regardless of which county you land in.
New Texas residents with a valid, unexpired out-of-state license generally have 90 days from moving to obtain a Texas driver's license through the Department of Public Safety — a meaningfully longer window than some other states use (Tennessee's, for comparison, is 30 days), so don't assume a shorter deadline applies here. Standard identity, residency, and Social Security documentation is required; check the current DPS checklist directly before your appointment, since accepted-document lists can change.
Unlike the driver's-license window, Texas vehicle registration for new residents runs on a 30-day clock from establishing residency — worth noting since it's a different deadline than Section 2's, not the same one. Registration is handled through your county tax assessor-collector's office (not a separate DMV storefront), requires a passing safety/emissions inspection where applicable (see Section 4), proof of Texas-minimum liability insurance, and filing Form 130-U; base state registration runs $51.75, with counties layering on additional local fees. A vehicle brought into Texas from another state is generally subject to a flat $90 "new resident tax" (rather than the standard 6.25% motor-vehicle use tax) if paid within 30 calendar days of first use in Texas (60 days for active-duty military) — miss that window and the standard 6.25% use tax applies instead.
Vehicle emissions inspection is required only in specified Texas counties, and every county covered in this guide — Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, and Galveston — is on that list, so plan on it as part of registering a vehicle almost anywhere in the greater Houston metro. Texas does not have a separate statewide periodic safety-inspection requirement for standard passenger vehicles beyond what's bundled into the registration/emissions process.
Texas requires voter registration at least 30 days before Election Day — postmarked or received by your county voter registrar by that date. Registration is inherently county-based, so a move between counties within the Houston metro (for example, from Harris into Fort Bend County) requires re-registering with the new county, not just updating an address. Confirm the current-cycle specific deadline with the Texas Secretary of State before an upcoming election.
Texas has no state income tax on individuals, a long-standing feature of the state's tax code further locked in by a 2019 constitutional amendment (Proposition 4) that requires a subsequent statewide vote to ever introduce one. The tradeoff: Texas's state sales tax rate is 6.25%, and local jurisdictions can add up to 2% more, for a statutory maximum combined rate of 8.25% — and Houston sits right at that 8.25% cap. The bigger tradeoff, though, is property tax (see our Houston property tax guide): multiple independent studies place Texas among the roughly ten highest-property-tax states nationally, which is where a meaningful share of the "no income tax" savings can get absorbed back, especially for a higher-value home or one inside a Municipal Utility District.
This is worth addressing directly rather than glossing over, since it's a real factor other metros in our coverage area don't carry to the same degree. Hurricane Harvey (August 2017) dropped a record-setting 48.20 inches of rain in the Houston area over four days — the Harris County Flood Control District estimated roughly 1 trillion gallons fell on the county, flooding an estimated 70% of it under at least 1.5 feet of water. Flood insurance is not covered by a standard homeowners policy — it's a separate policy, typically through the federal NFIP program (with a roughly 30-day waiting period before coverage starts) or a private flood insurer. It's federally required only for federally-backed mortgages on properties in FEMA-mapped high-risk zones, and optional — but often still worth carrying — in lower-risk zones, since a meaningful share of flood damage historically occurs outside the mapped 100-year floodplain. FEMA has periodically updated flood maps for Harris County in ways that have expanded mapped risk areas in recent years. Bottom line for a relocating buyer: a property sitting outside today's mapped floodplain isn't automatically zero-risk — check the current FEMA flood-zone status and ask about a specific property's flood history before buying, regardless of which of our nine Houston-area guides you're looking at.
Employer locations in Section 1 change as companies relocate, expand, or merge — verify against each company's current "About" page before relying on it. Section 7's flood-risk guidance reflects an evolving, periodically-updated federal mapping process rather than a static fact; we'll re-verify it periodically. If you spot something on this page that's out of date, or notice a broken link, we'd like to know — see our contact information.