Two markets, both counted the same morning
The median one bedroom starts at $1,055 in New Braunfels and $1,075 in San Marcos. The drive to the San Marcos square is 23 minutes from here and 8 from there. Everything below is measured, on both sides, by the site that crawls that market.
Nobody moves for rent alone and nobody moves for the drive alone. Here they are together, on the same size of home, from the same week.
Cheaper in New Braunfels at the one bedroom size, or $240 across a year.
Longer to the San Marcos square from the median New Braunfels community. On a five day commute, about 125 hours a year more in the car.
Put the two together and the trade is about $2 for every extra hour in the car. Whether that is a good trade is yours to judge, and it is the reason this page stops here instead of telling you which to pick.
The lowest advertised rent for each size, read from the communities' own sites. A size shows a dash where too few communities carry that size to make a median mean anything.
| Size | New Braunfels | San Marcos | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Studiotoo few here, too few there | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| One bedroom36 here, 43 there | $1,055 | $1,075 | $20 |
| Two bedroom38 here, 46 there | $1,333 | $1,255 | +$78 |
| Three bedroom29 here, 30 there | $1,800 | $1,694 | +$106 |
| Four bedroom8 here, too few there | $2,199 | n/a | n/a |
A figure in the difference column is what you would pay on top in San Marcos. Green means New Braunfels is the cheaper of the two at that size.
| Communities tracked | 60 | 103 |
|---|---|---|
| Carrying a confirmed rent | 48 | 62 |
| Cheapest starting rent | $799 | $700 |
| Running a special | 73.9% | 57.1% |
| Weeks free where offered | 7.5 | 6.8 |
Where these came from
The New Braunfels column is ours, read from each community's own site and banked on 2026-09-10. The San Marcos column comes from the site that crawls San Marcos, which measured it on 2026-09-10. Drive times are one reading with live traffic, last measured 2026-09-09. We publish no number for a market we do not crawl ourselves.
At the one bedroom size, the median starting rent is $1,055 here against $1,075 there, so the gap is $20 a month in our favour. Both are read from the communities' own sites, ours on 2026-09-10 and theirs on 2026-09-10.
The median community here is 23 minutes out and the median one there is 8, so 15 minutes more each way. On a five day commute that is roughly 125 hours a year more in the car.
That market's own site, which crawls it every night the same way we crawl ours. It publishes what it measures and we render it with its own date on it. Neither side is a survey, an estimate or a national average.
This page will not tell you. The honest answer turns on what an hour of your evening is worth, and no dataset holds that. What we can do is walk both markets with you and say which specific buildings are worth your time. That part is free.