Bexar County, TX Outdoor Lighting: Dark Sky Rules (2026)

Under Texas Health and Safety Code Chapter 240, counties and cities near military installations may adopt outdoor lighting regulations to protect night training. Bexar County adopted a Military Lighting Overlay District covering unincorporated areas within 5 miles of Camp Bullis, which conducts night vision training essential to Joint Base San Antonio. Within the overlay, new outdoor lighting fixtures must be fully shielded so that no light is emitted above the horizontal plane of the fixture, use lamps with correlated color temperature of 3000 Kelvin or less (amber or warm white), and comply with lumen caps scaled to site size. Uplighting of building facades, advertising signs, and landscape features is prohibited or sharply limited. Temporary lighting for construction and special events may receive short-term exemptions. Outside the Camp Bullis area, the county does not regulate residential lighting, but HOAs in some master-planned suburbs have adopted dark-sky-inspired architectural guidelines encouraging shielded fixtures and downward-focused landscape lighting. The San Antonio region also lies near McDonald Observatory protections further west, reinforcing the broader dark-sky ethic in central Texas.