By Austin Senior Advisor Care Team · July 17, 2026
Sun City Texas was built for active retirees, and it does that job well. It is ordinary age-restricted housing, not a care setting, and no personal care comes with the address. Here is what Georgetown families do when needs change.
What Sun City is, and what it is not
Sun City Texas is a Del Webb 55-plus development in Georgetown, roughly 35 miles north of Austin off I-35. Sources place it at approximately 7,500 to 8,500 homes built against a planned build-out of 10,000, on about 5,000 acres, with roughly 15,700 residents as of 2021. It is one of the reasons Georgetown keeps appearing on fastest-growing-city lists.
It is also, importantly, ordinary housing. Sun City is an age-restricted neighbourhood with amenities. It is not a licensed care setting. No personal care is provided, no staff are on site overnight, and there is no Texas HHSC licence attached to a Sun City home because none is required. The golf, the fitness centre and the clubs are real. Care is not part of the package.
That distinction is invisible while everyone is healthy and becomes the entire problem when someone is not. Families sometimes arrive at our door assuming that because a parent lives in a retirement community, some level of oversight comes with it. It does not.
None of this is a criticism of Sun City. It delivers exactly what it advertises. The mismatch happens because people move in at 62 and need something different at 82, and the community was never designed to bridge that.
Williamson County is ageing fast
Williamson County has approximately 752,827 residents, about 13.7 percent of them 65 or older, which works out to roughly 103,000 seniors. The 65-plus population has grown by approximately 23.6 percent since 2020, a faster rate than Travis County's. Across the metro there are roughly 305,000 older adults.
The county is also heavily veteran. Approximately 38,936 veterans live in Williamson County, and a meaningful share of Sun City households include one. That matters for how care gets paid for, and we come back to it below.
The practical consequence of that growth is that demand for licensed care in Georgetown and Round Rock has risen faster than supply of the good options. Waiting lists at well-regarded communities are real. This is the main argument for looking early rather than at the point of crisis.
The pattern we see in Georgetown
A couple moves to Sun City in their early sixties. It works beautifully for fifteen years. Then one of them has a stroke, or a dementia diagnosis arrives, and the house that was perfect becomes a two-storey problem some distance from a hospital.
What usually happens next is that the well spouse absorbs the care. Quietly, without ever describing it as caregiving, often for a year or more before anyone outside the household understands what is happening. The tell is not usually the person receiving care. It is the spouse who has stopped going to things. The bridge group, the walking group, church. They drop off one at a time and nobody asks why.
The second tell is the house itself. Laundry piling up in a home that was always immaculate. Expired food in the refrigerator. Mail unopened on the counter. A caregiving spouse triages, and housekeeping is what gets triaged away first.
If you are an adult child reading this from Dallas or Denver, the visit that matters is an ordinary Tuesday, not a holiday. Holidays get performed. Tuesdays do not.
What the house does to you
Walk the house as if you were assessing it, because you are. Stairs. Step-in shower with no bench and nothing to grab. Bedroom on the second floor. Distance from the bed to the toilet at 2am in the dark. Rugs. Lighting.
A lot of this is fixable and cheap. Grab bars, a shower bench, better lighting, moving the bedroom downstairs if the floor plan allows. AGE of Central Texas at 512-451-4611 runs a free health equipment lending programme covering wheelchairs, walkers and shower benches, which means the bench is a phone call rather than a purchase.
Some of it is not fixable. A two-storey house with the only full bathroom upstairs has a ceiling on how long it works, and no amount of equipment changes that. Knowing which category your parents' house falls into tells you whether you are planning for two more years there or ten.
Driving deserves its own conversation. Georgetown is car-dependent, and the moment driving stops, a Sun City house becomes considerably more isolating than it looks on a tour. Think about who takes them to appointments before that day arrives, not after.
The realistic options from a Sun City house
In-home care. The 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey puts the Texas median for a non-medical caregiver at $30 an hour, and Austin-area rates typically run above the state median. At twenty hours a week that is roughly $2,600 a month. It is the right answer for a lot of families, particularly early on, and it preserves everything that made Sun City worth moving to. Most agencies set minimum shift lengths, so ask about that before you build a schedule around two-hour visits.
Adult day health care. Substantially cheaper than the alternatives at a Texas median of about $90 a day, roughly $1,950 a month, and it gives the well spouse a genuine break rather than a theoretical one. AGE of Central Texas runs adult day health in Round Rock with a nurse on site at all times, which is a realistic drive from Georgetown. They also run a free early-stage memory loss programme and free CaregiverU courses.
A licensed community in Georgetown. There are licensed assisted living, memory care and independent living options within Georgetown itself, so a move does not have to mean leaving the area, the doctors, or the same set of friends. Before you tour, confirm the licence in TULIP at tulip.hhs.texas.gov. Texas licenses assisted living as Type A or Type B based on ability to evacuate, and memory care is not a licence type at all. It requires a separate Alzheimer's certification on a Type B licence.
Staying put with more support. Sometimes the right answer, and we say so more often than families expect. But do the arithmetic honestly. The published Texas assisted living median is $5,666 a month. Once paid care passes roughly forty to fifty hours a week, a community usually costs less, and around-the-clock home care at median rates runs somewhere near $21,800 a month, roughly four times the assisted living median.
How Georgetown families actually pay for it
Start by ruling out the thing everyone assumes. Medicare does not pay for assisted living, memory care, long-term custodial care, non-medical home care, or adult day care. It covers limited skilled nursing after a qualifying inpatient admission, intermittent skilled home health, and hospice. Observation-status nights in a hospital do not count toward the qualifying inpatient stay, which catches families out every year.
Texas has no broad state-funded assisted living benefit. What exists is STAR+PLUS HCBS, which covers assisted living care services but not room and board. For 2026 the thresholds are income under $2,982 a month for a single applicant, assets under $2,000, plus a Nursing Facility Level of Care determination. It is interest-list driven, and you apply through 2-1-1 Texas or YourTexasBenefits.com. Join the list early, even while paying privately. It does not move faster because your situation became urgent.
Nursing home Medicaid in Texas for 2026 uses the same $2,982 income figure and $2,000 asset limit, with a Community Spouse Resource Allowance reported at $162,660 and a Personal Needs Allowance of $75 a month. If one spouse stays in the Sun City house, the spousal rules matter enormously and are worth an hour with an elder law attorney.
For the many Sun City veteran households, VA Aid and Attendance is the most underused benefit in Williamson County. Effective December 1 2025, the maximum annual benefit is $29,093 for a veteran with no dependents, about $2,424 a month, and $18,697 for a surviving spouse, about $1,558 a month. The net worth limit is $163,699. The VA pays the difference between countable income and the maximum, and care costs reduce countable income, which is why households that assume they earn too much frequently qualify.
Local numbers worth keeping
The Aging and Disability Resource Center of the Capital Area at 855-937-2372, weekdays 8 to 5, is the general front door for long-term services and supports. The Area Agency on Aging of the Capital Area at 512-916-6062 handles benefits counselling.
The long-term care ombudsman for Williamson County is the Capital Area office at 512-916-6054 or 888-622-9111 option 3, at 6800 Burleson Road, Building 310, Suite 165, Austin 78744. Free, confidential, and they advocate for the resident. Note that the Area Agency on Aging of Central Texas in Belton is a different organisation covering a different set of counties, and it does not cover Georgetown.
For a resident in a licensed facility, HHSC Complaint and Incident Intake is 1-800-458-9858, weekdays 7am to 7pm Central. Family Eldercare is at 512-483-3580. Meals on Wheels Central Texas is at 512-477-2273.
On hospitals: St. David's HealthCare operates as an HCA joint venture with more than 180 sites including Round Rock and Georgetown, and Baylor Scott & White has Round Rock and Pflugerville campuses. For major trauma the region's Level I centre is Dell Seton Medical Center at UT, 1500 Red River Street in Austin. Know in advance which hospital your parents' physicians admit to.
Start before you need to
The families who handle this well are the ones who toured two Georgetown communities while nothing was wrong, purely so the option existed. It costs an afternoon and it removes the worst version of this decision, which is making it from a hospital room in seventy-two hours with a discharge planner waiting.
While you are at it, get the paperwork in order. Medical power of attorney, durable financial power of attorney, and a clear understanding of what the assets actually are. Half the delays we see in Georgetown are not about care at all. They are about a son in Houston who cannot legally sign anything.
Then have the conversation, badly if necessary. It rarely goes well the first time and it does not have to. What matters is that when the day comes, nobody is guessing what your parents would have wanted, and somebody already knows which building to call.