GIS & Geospatial Data Services

If you are looking for state level geospatial data that covers all of Texas you have come to the right place. This page provides a comprehensive list of open data portals that contain a wide variety of geospatial datasets for the state of Texas. As always, when you are looking for data for a specific area, like Texas, make sure that you are also considering looking for data available from higher level sources (like federal government agencies) which are likely to also have data for your study area. Thus, while you may be able to find demographic information for the state of Texas from one of the geoportals listed below, you may be able to find more detailed information or complementary information from U.S. Census Bureau data portals like https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/data-via-ftp.html and https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html. Also, when you are working with data for the entire state of Texas, keep in mind that Texas is the 2nd largest state by land area in the U.S. and some datasets (like roads, parcels, etc.) can be quite large, sometimes containing millions of features. These large datasets can be a bit unwieldly in GIS software because they can cause the software to lag as it attempts to draw and pull up information for so many features all at once and can cause data processing operations to take minutes rather than seconds to complete. In order to help avoid issues with large datasets consider clipping the data to your specific study area (if you are only concerned with data for a specific part of the state), use the Escape key on your key board to stop the data drawing process while you are working in your map view, consider pausing the data frame drawing if you are working in ArcMap, and make sure to be patient if your GIS software temporarily stops responding - it may still be successfully processing an operation and if you attempt to start another operation before it is finished you may end up crashing the application.