Who actually works in Southlake

September 2, 2026 · Southlake, Texas

Here is the fact that reframes this city. Southlake’s economic development office publishes a figure of 32,603 jobs in Southlake. The Census Bureau puts the resident population at 31,175 — of whom only around twenty-one thousand are adults.

Southlake almost certainly has more jobs inside it than it has residents. For a twenty-two-square-mile suburb that is unusual, and it explains a lot about why the tax base works the way it does and why the roads look the way they do at five o’clock.

A caveat on that 32,603, because I would rather give you the caveat than the clean sentence. The City does not publish the definition behind it — whether it counts full-time positions, all jobs including part-time and seasonal, or something drawn from a commercial data vendor. It is larger than Southlake’s entire adult population, which is the point, but it is not a headcount you should treat as precise. Directionally: this is a job center, not a bedroom community.

The three biggest employers

From the City’s own most recent financial report:

Note what that list says about the city: the largest private employer is a travel technology company, the second largest employer is the school district, and the third is a brokerage. No manufacturing, no distribution, no hospital system in the top three.

Sabre — and a number you should not quote out of date

Sabre Corporation is headquartered in Southlake, at 3150 Sabre Drive. That is in its own SEC filing, so it is about as verified as a fact gets. Sabre is the company behind Travelocity and the reservation systems a large share of the world’s airlines and travel agencies run on.

Two numbers, two meanings, and people mix them up: 4,650 is Sabre worldwide, from the 10-K. About 1,900 is the Southlake figure, from the City. Sabre does not break out its Southlake headcount, so the City’s number is the best available and I would cite it as the City’s.

Charles Schwab took the TD Ameritrade seat

If you have been away from this area for a few years, the campus you remember as TD Ameritrade is now Charles Schwab. Schwab completed its acquisition of TD Ameritrade in October 2020.

The change shows up cleanly in the City’s own records: an older city profile listed TD Ameritrade at 2,230 employees; the current financial report lists Charles Schwab at about 1,100, and TD Ameritrade no longer appears at all.

Worth knowing that Schwab’s corporate headquarters is in Westlake, the small town immediately next door. The Schwab presence in this corner of Tarrant County spans both.

The rest of the roster

Southlake’s economic development arm lists ten top employers: Sabre, TD Ameritrade (the campus Schwab now runs — see above, and note that the list has not been updated for the name change), Carroll ISD, Keller Williams, Gateway Church, Verizon Wireless, the City of Southlake, Central Market, Hilton Southlake and Methodist Southlake Medical Center — without publishing counts for most of them.

For historical contrast, the City’s older profile had it as Sabre 2,550, TD Ameritrade 2,230, Carroll ISD 1,176, Verizon Wireless 685 and Keller Williams 650. Comparing those two lists is a decent five-minute history of the last decade here.

One correction to something you will see repeated: Keurig Dr Pepper is not a Southlake employer. KDP’s own press release announced it was relocating its Texas headquarters to Frisco. If a relocation guide tells you otherwise, it is out of date.

The commute, and the airport

Three corridors carry everything:

• SH 114 — the spine. The route was designated in 1926 and built out over the following decades; the stretch through Southlake was reconstructed around the turn of the century into the grade-separated freeway it is now, with frontage roads and a wide main-lane section through the Town Square interchange. It runs east to DFW Airport and on toward Dallas, and west toward Fort Worth via SH 170 and I-35W.
• FM 1709 / Southlake Boulevard — the east-west retail artery. Every shopping district in the city fronts it, which is both convenient and the reason it backs up.
• FM 1938 / Davis Boulevard — the western edge, and roughly the Keller ISD boundary side of town. Historically the Jellico crossroads.

The Census puts Southlake’s mean travel time to work at 25.6 minutes. That is a genuinely good number for this metroplex, and it is the practical payoff of a city that sits between DFW Airport, the SH 114 corridor and the Alliance employment area.

The city adopted a Mobility Master Plan on 5 December 2023, and it publishes a Master Thoroughfare Map, a Master Pathways Map and a prioritized sidewalk construction list — which is more transparency about future road work than most suburbs offer. If you are weighing two addresses, it is worth ten minutes.

What the city actually runs on

Southlake’s finances are unusual enough to be worth a buyer’s attention, because they affect your bill.

• FY2026 city property tax rate: $0.295 per $100 — the eighth consecutive reduction, and the city says the lowest rate since the mid-1980s.
• A 20 percent homestead exemption — the maximum allowed by law.
• Total FY2026 budget of roughly $137.7 million.
• A dedicated half-cent sales tax for parks, through the Southlake Parks Development Corporation, since the mid-1990s. A Crime Control and Prevention District half-cent that began in 1998 — and which voters reduced to an eighth of a cent in 2015, freeing up the difference. That freed-up capacity is what became the three-eighths-cent Type A sales tax through the Community Enhancement Development Corporation, which funded Champions Club at The Marq without raising anyone’s property tax. Worth understanding, because it is the single clearest example of how this city pays for things.

The reason a city of 31,000 can cut its tax rate eight years running and still build an 82,000-square-foot recreation center is that job base and 4.6 million square feet of retail at 95 percent occupancy. Commercial and sales tax carry a share of the load that residents would otherwise carry.

Note also that the city’s rate is a small slice of your actual bill. The combined rate on the Tarrant County side runs closer to 1.71 percent, most of it school district. I broke that down in VA loans in Southlake, and the same table applies to any buyer.

Who lives here, by the numbers

Population is the Census Bureau’s 2025 estimate; the rest are 2020–2024 American Community Survey estimates.

On median household income, the Census reports “$250,000+” — which is not a number, it is the reporting ceiling. Southlake’s median household income is high enough that the Census Bureau stops counting. I would rather tell you that than print a fake precise figure, and you will see plenty of those.

Two figures that sit oddly together and both matter: 74.6 percent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 31.3 percent of the population is under eighteen. This is a city of educated parents, and it tells you exactly why the school section of any Southlake conversation carries the weight it does.

What I take from all of it

Southlake is not a bedroom community, which is how it gets described. It is a small employment center with a very expensive residential ring around it, five miles from an international airport, that stopped growing twenty-five years ago and has been cutting its tax rate ever since.

If you work in the SH 114 corridor, at the airport, or at Alliance, the commute math here is about as good as this metroplex offers. If you work in downtown Dallas, be honest with yourself about the drive before you fall for a house.

Rebecca Kennedy

REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas

I help buyers and sellers across the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex — Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller, and the surrounding Dallas area. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.

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