Hidalgo County Mosquito Control: Who Sprays, City by City

Who to call depends on which side of a city line the water sits

Inside a city, the city sprays; outside one, the county does. Two county offices work on mosquitoes. The Hidalgo County Health and Human Services Department runs Vector Control from its Environmental Health Division in Edinburg, with surveillance, adulticiding (spraying for adult mosquitoes), larviciding (treating water so larvae never become biters) and public education, and it counts the arboviral season, the months when mosquito-borne viruses circulate, as June through November. Separately, Commissioner Precinct 1 keeps its own Vector Division, which sprays according to the volume of calls it receives, late at night, never in rain, and sparingly, because the page says mosquitoes grow resistant when fogging is too frequent. In an April 2025 county notice carried by local press, the department told residents inside city limits to contact their own city's vector control for information; the table below is that list.

The seven programs, side by side

Two pages disagree on one number: Mission's department page and its spraying notice give different phone numbers for the same request. Both are in the table. Where a page named no trigger, the cell says what the page does say.

What all seven have in common

Every one of the seven pages asks residents for the same thing before it mentions a truck: tip the water. The county health department puts it as "Drain, Dress, Defend." Edinburg's list runs to fifteen items and sets a two-day limit on any standing water. Precinct 1 wants bird-bath water changed at least weekly. The reason is in the county's own words after Hurricane Hanna in 2020, when the health department's chief administrative officer told The Monitor that eighty percent of mosquito control can be done by residents in their own yards, and in a later storm that the problem "is not going to go away with spraying and fumigation" because county crews cannot enter private property. The same official called spraying the least effective preventive method and larvae in water the thing that moves the numbers, in a May 2023 report.

That split is the whole point of reading this table before calling anyone. A public truck treats the right-of-way, the ditch and the street; the plant saucers, roof gutters and tarp folds on a private lot stay the household's job, and the spot-by-spot list of where a McAllen yard holds water is the checklist for it.

West Nile in Hidalgo County: what the counts look like

The county health department's arboviral season runs June through November, later than most of Texas, and the dusk mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus are the Culex the public trucks aim at. The Texas Department of State Health Services publishes West Nile by county as yearly maps and weekly activity reports rather than a county table, and its weekly county tables leave out any condition with fewer than five cases in a year, so the clearest Hidalgo figure is the county's own. In November 2024 the department's epidemiology team said it had investigated 12 West Nile cases that year, nine of them in people who had not travelled outside the county or state, while mosquito samples sent to the state had all tested negative. The county's position, repeated in its releases, is that final classification of a case as locally acquired belongs to the state. The Valley mosquito calendar explains why the biting season here runs so late.

Where a yard visit fits beside the public programs

None of the seven programs treats a private backyard, and none of them is supposed to. What a licensed Texas structural pest control business adds is the part the trucks never reach: a breeding-site sweep of the property, Bti, a bacterial larvicide, dropped into water nobody can tip, and a barrier treatment on the shaded surfaces where the daytime biter rests. The published price on this site for that visit is $75 to $110 for a monthly visit on an average-sized lot, and the McAllen mosquito visit that works the water a city truck never reaches is described in full on the mosquito control page. A call to this site reaches one independent local business, which quotes and does the work; the public programs above are free, and the first call after a flood should still be to them.

The pages behind the table

• Hidalgo County Health and Human Services, Environmental Health Division, Vector (Mosquito) Control. Read November 8, 2026.
• Hidalgo County, Commissioner Precinct 1, Vector Division. Read November 8, 2026.
• City of McAllen, Health & Code Enforcement Department, and the city's release "McAllen to Increase Mosquito Spraying" (October 25, 2017). Read November 8, 2026.
• City of Edinburg, Vector Control. Read November 8, 2026.
• City of Pharr, "City of Pharr to Begin Mosquito Spraying" (April 4, 2025). Read November 8, 2026.
• City of Mission, Health Department and its post "Our Mission Health Department is currently spraying for mosquitoes" (undated). Read November 8, 2026.
• City of Alamo, "Mosquito Spraying" (June 2026 flyer) and KRGV, April 20, 2026. Read November 8, 2026.
• KRGV, "Potential cases of locally acquired West Nile identified in Hidalgo County" (November 22, 2024), and the Texas DSHS West Nile maps. Read November 8, 2026.
• El Periódico USA, Hidalgo County mosquito control notice (April 5, 2025). Read November 8, 2026.
• The Monitor (myrgv.com): county vector task force after Hurricane Hanna (2020), state waiver for precinct spraying crews, and "Mosquito task force spraying against pests in Hidalgo County" (May 24, 2023). Read November 8, 2026.

Phone numbers and triggers change with budgets and storms. The dates above are the day each page was read, not a promise about today's schedule; after a flood, each city posts its spray map on its own channels first.