Every retail pitch on this border rests on the same sentence: there are a quarter of a million people across the river. The sentence is true. It is also the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it, and the crossing data says something more specific and considerably more useful than the sentence does.
Two flows cross here and they are moving in opposite directions. Pedestrians are at an all-time modern high, up more than half since 2019. Personal vehicles are still below 2019 and falling. A retailer underwriting walk-up trade near the bridge and a retailer underwriting drive-to capture on the loop are underwriting two different markets, and only one of them is growing.
What crosses, measured
U.S. Customs and Border Protection counts every inbound crossing and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics publishes it free. Eagle Pass is port 2303, which aggregates both bridges.
| Year | Pedestrians | Personal vehicles | Vehicle passengers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 861,632 | 2,855,124 | 5,969,602 |
| 2021 | 574,935 | 2,060,808 | 3,907,752 |
| 2023 | 944,750 | 2,794,050 | 5,670,402 |
| 2024 | 1,074,641 | 2,934,990 | 5,970,285 |
| 2025 | 1,313,721 | 2,750,628 | 5,469,914 |
| 2025 vs 2019 · pedestrians +52.5% · vehicles −3.7% · passengers −8.4% | |||
Total person-crossings inbound in 2025, including bus passengers: 6,961,101. That is 241 northbound person-crossings for every Eagle Pass resident.
That single ratio is the hard evidence that the functional trade area is far larger than the census population — and it is the number to reach for when someone shows you a demographic profile of twenty-nine thousand people and calls it the market.
What that number is not
Four limits, and a retailer who does not know them will size a store wrong.
It counts crossings, not people. A daily commuter is counted roughly 250 times a year. There is no unique-visitor figure and nobody publishes one.
It counts inbound only. CBP does not collect outbound crossings, so there is no round-trip measure.
It is not a shopper count. It includes U.S. citizens returning home, students, workers and freight drivers. BTS does not disaggregate by purpose or nationality, at any port.
The 2024–25 pedestrian surge coincides with a period of unusual migration and enforcement activity at this specific port. That may inflate the count relative to shopper traffic. We cannot separate the two from this dataset and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
You will sometimes see sales divided by crossings to produce a spend-per-crossing figure. Eagle Pass retail sales over 2025 person-crossings works out at $55.82. That is arithmetic on two sourced numbers, not a measured basket size, and it should be presented that way or not at all.
The 2026 turn
The 2025 peak is not continuing.
| January–June | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pedestrians | 571,952 | 553,190 | −3.3% |
| Personal vehicles | 1,346,833 | 1,335,442 | −0.8% |
| Vehicle passengers | 2,670,828 | 2,606,236 | −2.4% |
Every personal-travel measure at this port declined year over year in the first half of 2026. Six months is not a year and BTS monthly data are revised. But a retailer building a 2026 pro forma off the 2025 peak is building off the high-water mark.
Against 2019 the picture is split and stays split: pedestrians +32.8%, personal vehicles −5.5%, vehicle passengers −11.1%.
What the Dallas Fed actually found — and why Eagle Pass is not in it
The best published quantification of the cross-border shopper economy in Texas comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which estimates the Mexican-shopper share of retail sales for Texas border metros.
It covers El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville. Eagle Pass is not among them. There is no published estimate of the Mexican-shopper share of Eagle Pass retail sales. If someone quotes you one, ask where it came from.
The direction of travel is down, and the reasons are structural rather than currency. The Dallas Fed's January 2026 work finds Laredo's exported retail sales fell from over 20 percent of local retail sales in 2002 to zero by 2017, before recovering to roughly 15 percent by 2023. It attributes the erosion primarily to Mexican big-box expansion and longer U.S. port-of-entry waits — Walmart went from 204 stores in Mexico in 1998 to 3,154 locations by 2024; Costco from 16 to 41.
For scale on how much this driver has decayed: two decades ago the same institution put Mexican shoppers at $2.3 billion a year across those four cities, 26.4% of their total retail trade, with Laredo at 51%.
There are real offsets, and honesty requires naming them. Mexico's federal minimum wage is up roughly 135% in real terms since December 2018, with further increases in 2026, and the peso has appreciated recently. The Dallas Fed's own closing caution is that enforcement activity around border retail may further deter Mexican shoppers.
Source: Brizuela, Cañas and Leigh, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Southwest Economy, 16 January 2026; and Cañas, Coronado and Phillips, Southwest Economy, May/June 2006.
What this means for a store here
Three things follow, and none of them is "there are 273,000 people across the river."
The growing flow is on foot. Pedestrian crossings are at a modern high and up more than half since 2019. Walk-up trade near the bridges is the flow that has actually grown. Drive-to capture on the loop is being underwritten against a flow that is still below where it was seven years ago.
The peso is not the main variable. The published research points at Mexican retail supply and crossing friction ahead of exchange rates. A model that hedges the peso and ignores wait times is hedging the wrong risk.
Nobody has measured the thing you actually want to know. There is no Eagle Pass shopper share, no unique-visitor count, no basket size, and no occupancy figure for any retail property in this market. That is not a gap in this page — it is the state of the public record, and it is why site selection here is fieldwork rather than a data pull.
Common questions
How many people cross into Eagle Pass from Mexico each year?
About 6.96 million inbound person-crossings in 2025 — 1,313,721 pedestrians, 5,469,914 personal-vehicle passengers and 177,466 bus passengers. That is 241 northbound crossings per Eagle Pass resident. The figure counts crossings, not unique people, and includes US citizens, workers, students and freight drivers.
Is cross-border shopping at Eagle Pass growing?
It depends which flow. Pedestrian crossings are 52.5% above 2019 and hit a modern high in 2025. Personal vehicles and vehicle passengers remain below 2019 and fell in 2025. In the first half of 2026 every personal-travel measure declined year over year.
What share of Eagle Pass retail sales comes from Mexican shoppers?
No published estimate exists. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates this for El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville — Eagle Pass is not included in that work, and no other source quantifies it.
Does the peso exchange rate drive border retail sales?
Less than commonly assumed. Dallas Fed research attributes the long erosion in Mexican-shopper share primarily to the expansion of big-box retail inside Mexico and to longer port-of-entry wait times, rather than to currency. Peso sensitivity also varies by city.
Sources. U.S. DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Border Crossing/Entry Data (CBP-collected), dataset keg4-3bc2, port 2303, data through June 2026; Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Southwest Economy (January 2026 and May/June 2006); Texas Comptroller Quarterly Sales Tax Historical Data. Verified as of August 2026; project statuses change and every figure should be re-verified before it is relied upon.