Outdoor advertising in Austin: what runs, who sells it, what the rules say, and what third parties publish on cost

Austin out-of-home inventory is a fixed stock of roadside billboards under a city code that prohibits new off-premise signs, CapMetro's 400-plus buses and 10 rail stations sold by Clear Channel Outdoor since a January 2026 award, the AUS airport concession, and moving formats: car tops, wraps, LED trucks and pedicabs. This archive holds 140 photographed Austin campaigns.

Austin is a market where the supply side is written into the code. The city prohibits new off-premise signs, so the billboard stock inside the limits does not grow, and the transit concession changed hands at the start of 2026. This page is the Austin row of the archive behind this site opened up: 140 photographed frames from 24 brands, grouped by format and checked one by one, followed by who owns each inventory type on the owner's own page, the rules CapMetro and the city publish, and the third-party rate ranges that exist for this market with their retrieval dates. The category itself is explained on out-of-home advertising; this page is only about Austin.

What has actually run in Austin?

Every frame below is a photograph of a live campaign in Austin. The caption is brand, city, format and year as the archive records them; the year is omitted where the source date did not parse. Frames whose manifest tag did not match the photograph were removed before publication.

Digital car tops

Wrapped vehicles carrying tops

LED trucks

Pedicabs

Who owns the inventory in Austin?

Each row was read on the owner's own page or on the authority's page on September 14, 2026. No owner in this table publishes a rate. The order is by asset, not by size.

The transit line is the one to re-check if your plan is older than this year. Intersection's 2022 national kit listed Austin among its eleven bus markets; CapMetro's page now names Clear Channel for bus and rail, and Clear Channel's release dates the award to January 27, 2026. Intersection's Austin market page returned a 404 on the day this page was written. A brief that says "CapMetro, via Intersection" is describing the previous concession. The mechanics of concessions, King and Tail sizes and wrap rules are on bus advertising.

Clear Channel's Austin footprint is also narrower than its national one. Its Austin market page describes the CapMetro partnership and the AUS airport, with a San Antonio office address, and no roadside billboards. The roadside operator that publishes an Austin market page is Lamar, under the name Austin-San Antonio-Central Texas. A marketplace lists Reagan Outdoor, MediaChoice and Burkett Media as further Austin billboard operators; their own pages could not be read for this desk, so they are named here as a marketplace claim and nothing more.

What rules change what can run in Austin?

Two rulebooks matter, one for the fixed stock and one for the buses. Both were read in the primary source.

The alcohol line is the practical one. CapMetro accepts alcohol advertising if it carries an "enjoy responsibly" message or similar; tobacco is rejected outright. The same brand cannot show a bottle on a Los Angeles Metro bus at all. A beverage plan that treats "transit" as one rule will be wrong in one of the two cities, and the format-by-regulator table on transit advertising is built for exactly that check. On the fixed side, the code's relocation route explains a pattern in the published ranges: because faces cannot be added, the ones on I-35 and MoPac carry the premium.

What do third parties publish on Austin cost?

The ranges below are market-level figures compiled from publicly published vendor and industry sources. They are not quotes, and they are not the rates of any single network, including the operator whose campaigns the archive on this site documents, which prices per campaign and does not publish a rate card. Always get a written quote before budgeting.

Read the three rows against each other before using any of them. Blue Line's bulletin floor is $5,000; AdQuick's Austin page puts it at $3,500 and its national page at $1,500, so the same publisher carries two floors for the same market on the same day. Blue Line's bulletin ceiling is $8,000; AdQuick's Austin page runs to $15,000 and to $30,000 or more for flagship faces. Blue Line lists a digital poster as "TBD". None of the three states a sample or a method, and the operator that owns the boards publishes nothing. Treat the table as the published opinions that exist, not as a market price.

How is delivery counted in Austin?

The same way as everywhere else for a fixed face: Geopath models impressions from traffic counts and a visibility adjustment, so a bulletin on I-35 is priced on the people modelled to notice it, not on the cars that pass. A car top or an LED truck is counted the other way round, by the route the screen travels and the time it spends in each place, and that structural difference, not any multiplier, is explained on how out-of-home impressions are measured. The AdQuick Austin page publishes corridor impression figures; they are the marketplace's own and are not repeated here.

What this archive can say about Austin is which formats have run here. The row below is derived from the manifest: each cell is the number of documented frames of that surface or carrier photographed in Austin.

Reflects campaigns documented in this archive; absence is not evidence of unavailability. Counts are photographs, not campaigns or units, and a frame tagged with two surfaces is counted under each.

Two things stand out in the Austin row. There is no fixed spectacular and no static top in the set, and the hologram count comes from a single 2025 film campaign whose frames were left off this page because the hologram is not visible in them. The full matrix across all 21 markets, filterable by year and brand, is on the campaign archive.

This page exists because Austin passed a four-part gate: at least twelve verified frames photographed in the market, the transit authority's advertising standards read live, at least two named third-party rate sources for the market, and a real row in the format-by-market matrix. Markets that fail any part do not get a page.