Twenty years ago, “the cost of living in Aubrey” was a short conversation. The town was a couple thousand people, a grain elevator, a feed store, and a lot of fence line. Then the master-planned communities arrived — Sandbrock Ranch, Providence, Silverado, Winn Ridge, Cross Oak Ranch — and the question got a lot more interesting.
Aubrey’s population was 5,006 at the 2020 census, roughly double what it was in 2010. It has kept climbing since. That growth is the single most important thing to understand about what it costs to live here: prices, taxes, and even your commute are all being shaped by how fast the fields north of US-380 are turning into rooftops. Here’s an honest, sourced look at the numbers as they stood heading into 2026.
What a home costs
Housing is the biggest line in almost anyone’s budget, and it’s also the number where you should be most careful about which figure you trust.
The steadiest benchmark comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. Its American Community Survey (2024 5-year estimates) put Aubrey’s median home value at about $345,000. That’s a smoothed, multi-year figure, which is exactly why it’s useful in a small, fast-moving market.
Real-estate trackers, which report month-to-month sale prices, were noisier. In late 2025, different providers pegged Aubrey’s median sale price anywhere from the low $300,000s to the mid-$400,000s in the same stretch — a wide spread that says less about the town flip-flopping and more about how few homes change hands here and how differently each service counts brand-new construction. Several also showed year-over-year prices softening rather than rising.
The practical takeaway: budget somewhere in the $330,000–$450,000 band for a typical single-family home, and know that a new build in a flagship community and a resale on an older lot near downtown can sit on opposite ends of that range. Renters have options too — the 76227 corridor has filled with newer apartments and rental homes, though monthly rents here run well above what the town charged a decade ago.
Property taxes: the line that surprises newcomers
Texas has no state income tax, and the state makes up a good deal of that at the county assessor’s office. If you’re moving from out of state, this is the number that tends to catch people off guard.
The good news at the county level: the Denton County commissioners adopted a rate of $0.185938 per $100 of valuation for tax year 2025 — a small cut from the prior year, and the county’s lowest rate since 1986. But the county is only one slice of your bill. Your total rate stacks the county, your school district, the city, and sometimes a special district on top of one another.
For a typical Aubrey home, the effective property tax rate lands around 1.37% of value, per property-data service Ownwell — meaning a $375,000 home carries a bill in the neighborhood of $5,000 a year before exemptions. Your homestead exemption, if this is your primary residence, brings that down.
The wrinkle worth knowing before you sign: many of Aubrey’s newer master-planned neighborhoods sit inside a Municipal Utility District (MUD) or a Public Improvement District (PID). Those districts issued bonds to build the roads, water lines, and amenities, and homeowners inside them pay an additional levy to retire that debt — which can add meaningfully to the total rate. Two houses a mile apart can carry noticeably different tax bills purely because one is inside a MUD or PID and the other isn’t. It’s not a reason to avoid those communities, but it is a reason to ask for the full, all-in tax rate on any specific address rather than trusting a headline number. Denton County publishes a property tax estimator that’s worth running before you fall in love with a floor plan.
Utilities and the Texas power market
Aubrey sits inside Texas’s deregulated electricity market (the ERCOT grid), which means most residents get to choose their retail electric provider rather than being handed a single utility. That’s a genuine lever on your budget — plans, contract lengths, and per-kilowatt-hour rates vary, and it pays to shop them, especially before a Texas summer runs your air conditioning for four straight months.
Water, wastewater, and trash are handled locally, and in the MUD communities those services often come bundled through the district. Natural gas, where available, is a separate line. None of these are exotic, but the summer electric bill is the one to plan around: cooling a North Texas home from June through September is the season that defines the utility budget here.
The commute math
Aubrey’s price of admission has always been partly about location. The town is roughly 12 miles from Denton and sits about 40 miles north of downtown Dallas — close enough to reach the metroplex’s jobs, far enough that land was cheaper when these neighborhoods were platted.
Census data pegs the average one-way commute for Aubrey workers at roughly 34 minutes, which is a hair above the national norm and reflects how many residents drive south or east for work. The main arteries are US-377 through the heart of town, FM-1385, and US-380 for the east-west run toward Frisco and McKinney. The ongoing Dallas North Tollway extension pushing north through Denton County is steadily changing that picture — faster trips for tollway commuters, with the tradeoff of daily toll charges you’ll want to fold into your real cost of getting to work.
Two households with identical mortgages can have very different monthly budgets depending on whether one partner drives to Denton and the other to downtown Dallas. When you price a house here, price the drive with it.
The no-income-tax tradeoff, and everyday costs
Texas levies no state income tax, which is a real and permanent line in your favor. In exchange, the state leans on property and sales taxes — the base state sales tax is 6.25%, and local add-ons bring most Texas purchases to the familiar 8.25% ceiling.
Day-to-day, Aubrey behaves like a growing exurb: groceries and gas track regional North Texas averages, and a fair amount of bigger-ticket shopping and dining still happens over in Denton, Prosper, or along the US-380 corridor rather than in town — though that’s changing as retail follows the rooftops. Families should factor in that most of Aubrey falls within Aubrey ISD, with parts served by Denton ISD, and that the school district is itself one of the taxing entities on your bill.
So what does it add up to?
There’s no single “cost of living in Aubrey” number, and anyone who quotes you one to the dollar is guessing. But the shape of it is clear. You’re trading a longer drive for more house and newer construction than you’d get closer in; you’re paying Texas’s property-tax price for the no-income-tax upside; and if you buy in one of the marquee master-planned communities, you’re likely absorbing a MUD or PID levy that funded the very amenities you moved here for.
For a lot of families — drawn by the schools, the newer homes, and the fact that Ray Roberts Lake and open country are still a short drive north — that math works. Just run the specific numbers on the specific address: the all-in tax rate, the commute, and a realistic summer electric bill. In a town growing this fast, the averages are a starting point, not an answer.
