Run the numbers on 2025 median home prices across Collin County and one line breaks the pattern. Frisco's median slipped. McKinney's dropped by tens of thousands. Celina's fell hard enough to show up on any chart. Plano's went up.
The instinct is to read that backward. Rising price usually means hotter market, hotter market means you got outbid twice already, so cross it off the list and look at the suburbs where prices are falling instead. That read is wrong here, and the reason it's wrong is the actual story worth understanding if you're comparing Plano against its faster-growing neighbors.
The Number Everyone Reads Backward
For the 2025 full year, Plano's median closed at $540,000, a modest increase of about $2,000 over 2024. In the same twelve months, Frisco's median fell somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000 depending on which year-end market report you check, McKinney's dropped roughly $35,000, and Celina's fell by about $90,000. Plano was the only city in that group where the number moved up instead of down.
That gap did not come from Plano buyers bidding harder. It came from what was actually selling. Frisco, McKinney, and Celina are still in active build-out, and when buyer demand cooled through 2025, builders in those cities responded the way builders do: they shifted toward lower-priced product lines to keep homes moving. Those cheaper new builds pulled the citywide median down, even though plenty of existing homes in those same cities held their value just fine. Plano didn't have that lever to pull, because it barely has new construction left to sell. New homes accounted for less than 1 percent of Plano's 2025 closed sales. The market there is almost entirely resale, which means there's no builder discount sitting in the data to drag the median in either direction.
The suburbs losing ground on paper aren't losing value. They're losing the ability to hide behind their own price tag.
That stability has carried into 2026. Over the three months ending July 2026, Plano's median sale price still sat at $540,000, up 1.8 percent from the same period a year earlier. Whatever drove the 2025 divergence hasn't reversed.
What "Plano's Median" Actually Hides
A single citywide number also flattens a real range, and that range is where most buyers actually shop. Plano's 2025 ZIP-level medians looked like this:
| Area | ZIP codes | 2025 median |
|---|---|---|
| East Plano | 75074 | $405,000 |
| Central Plano | 75023, 75025, 75075 | $440,000 – $498,375 |
| West Plano | 75093, 75024 | $677,500 – $770,000 |
That's nearly a $365,000 spread inside one city. East Plano's lower entry point mostly reflects age: those neighborhoods were built through the 1970s and 90s, so buyers there should plan for updates to systems that are approaching or past their expected lifespan, on top of the purchase price. West Plano's premium tracks with newer stock, larger lots in communities like Willow Bend, and proximity to the Legacy corridor's job base along the Dallas North Tollway. Central Plano, where established neighborhoods such as Deerfield sit, lands in between on both price and age of construction.
The point isn't that West Plano is better or East Plano is worse. It's that a buyer comparing "Plano" to "Frisco" as if each were a single number is comparing two things that don't actually exist as single numbers. The subdivision matters more than the city line.
The AT&T Signal
The clearest evidence that Plano's resale stability isn't just a data quirk showed up in January 2026, when AT&T announced it would relocate its global headquarters from downtown Dallas to a new campus in Plano's Legacy district. The $1.3 billion project will sit on 54 acres at 5400 Legacy Drive, the site of the former Electronic Data Systems campus that had stood mostly vacant for more than seven years. AT&T is targeting partial occupancy as early as the second half of 2028.
Plano City Council approved a $20 million incentive package in February 2026 to help bring the project across the line, the largest economic development grant the city has ever offered, split between the campus redevelopment and job creation. Plano Mayor John Muns called it a project that would represent "a powerful reinvestment in the Legacy business district."
AT&T joins Toyota, JPMorgan Chase, and Liberty Mutual as major employers already anchored in that same corridor, and Raising Cane's has separately expanded its Plano office footprint nearby. None of that adds new housing stock. What it adds is more of the steady, transfer-driven demand that has kept Plano's resale market moving without needing new subdivisions to absorb it. That's the same mechanism showing up from a different direction: Plano doesn't need to build its way to price stability because employers keep bringing buyers to it. Meanwhile, AT&T's move leaves its downtown Dallas footprint in question, a reminder that this kind of corporate relocation reshapes more than one city at a time.
What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods
None of this makes Plano cheaper than Frisco. It isn't. Frisco's median still sits well above Plano's even after its 2025 dip. What it changes is what a falling or rising median actually tells you about a specific city, which matters if you're trying to time an offer or judge whether a price is fair. Before you read too much into any city's year-over-year number, it's worth asking:
- What share of nearby active listings is new construction, and are builders currently offering price cuts or rate buydowns to move it? If so, the citywide median may be softer than the resale homes you're actually touring.
- Is the ZIP code median representative of the exact subdivision, or is a different price tier nearby pulling the number in a direction that doesn't match what you're seeing on a walkthrough?
- What's the typical sold-to-list ratio in that specific market? Plano's 2025 ratio ran close to 97 to 99 percent for most of the year, which means offers landing near asking price were the norm, not homes selling at a steep discount off list.
- If a market has new construction scheduled to deliver soon, how might that change the resale calculus in the next year? Plano itself has roughly 500 homes in the pipeline across Collin Creek, Haggard Farms, and additional Willow Bend infill, a potential 22 percent inventory increase if all of it lands in the same window. Watch how that gets priced when it arrives.
A Couple of Questions Worth Asking Early
Does a rising median mean Plano is a better deal than a city where prices fell? Not automatically. A falling median in a growth suburb often reflects builder pricing strategy on new inventory, not a decline in what existing homes are worth. Compare specific, similar homes rather than citywide averages when you're deciding where your budget goes furthest.
Will new construction change Plano's price stability? It could, if the current pipeline delivers on schedule and prices aggressively to move volume the way builders have done elsewhere in Collin County. That hasn't happened yet. Worth watching over the next year, especially if you're weighing a resale purchase now against waiting for new product to hit the market.
Numbers like these are useful, but they only tell you what happened, not what a specific house is actually worth to you. That's where a local read matters more than a spreadsheet. If you're weighing a resale in an established Plano neighborhood against new construction somewhere still building out, or trying to figure out what a ZIP code's median actually means for the street you're touring, Go To Texas Team can walk through the comparison with you, including the construction-quality read that comes from Leo's background evaluating what's actually built well versus what's priced to move. Reach out when you're ready to start narrowing the list.
