Round Rock's Best Massage & Acupuncture: 12 Compared (2026)

Start with the paperwork, because that is where this clinic separates itself. It is the only Round Rock provider whose own site publishes an in-network acupuncture list — BCBS, Cigna, ASH, Aetna and UHC — alongside a readable self-pay card that prices initial visits, follow-ups, limited visits and progress exams separately. In a market where most acupuncture practices publish no rates at all, that is a rare amount of information to have before you call. Behind it sits a 21-year-old multi-discipline practice: two named acupuncturists, Dr. Jose G. Peña and Dr. Kunika Bharodia, both LAc, MAOM, DACM and both trained at the American College of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine in Houston, working the same address and phone tree as the massage therapists and the chiropractic side. The acupuncture menu runs past needling into electro-acupuncture, cupping, gua sha, moxibustion, herbs and cosmetic work; the chiropractic side adds prenatal, pediatric and craniosacral care. The obvious caveat is the mirror image of the clinic's strength: massage rates are posted only as an image file, so the one number a massage-only client wants is the one you have to phone for. Two modalities, two sets of practitioners, one billing department — which is a different proposition from one practitioner doing both.

Founder-discipline shapes a clinic's menu, and this one reads exactly like what it is: a practice built by an acupuncturist, Charleen Whipple, that then added hands-on work around the core. Acupuncture and dry needling sit at the top of the service list; Swedish, prenatal, lymphatic and myofascial deep-tissue massage follow; Reiki, colon hydrotherapy, infrared sauna, local cryotherapy and functional-medicine testing fill out a wellness bench wider than any other clinic in this guide. It is one of only two Round Rock practices we could confirm delivering both massage and acupuncture from the same business, and the only one of the two sitting on Main Street in the historic downtown core rather than in a suburban office park — a real difference if you are combining a session with anything else downtown. Two limits matter. No price list appeared on any page we fetched, so cost is a phone call, which is a meaningful gap in a market where the clinic ranked above it publishes a full acupuncture card. And while local coverage describes Whipple as a seasoned acupuncturist, we could not confirm the L.Ac. abbreviation from a fetched page — the state license lookup settles that in a minute if it matters to you.

Thirty-two years is the headline. Sue Livingston, L.Ac. opened this clinic in 1993 and still publishes her Texas license number, AC0030, on the site — a small act of transparency that is worth more in this particular market than it would be anywhere else in this series, and one only a handful of Round Rock businesses bother with. She holds an M.S. from Texas Health and Science University and practices alongside Angelica Gonzalez, L.Ac., Dipl.O.M., an NCCAOM-certified acupuncturist. The clinic is a traditional Chinese medicine practice in the older sense: acupuncture, herbal formulas, cupping and NAET allergy work, with no massage menu and no wellness-center add-ons. It also runs on older mechanics. We found no online scheduling — appointments appear to be made by phone — and no aggregate star rating could be verified from any fetched source, only testimonials on directory pages, which we do not treat as independent evidence. One address note that matters for readers searching by street number: this clinic is in Building A at 1803 N Mays St. Publish the building, not just the number, when you look it up.

The economics here are the product. Yvonne Kettering treats several patients at once, fully clothed, in reclining chairs in a shared room — the community acupuncture model — and that shared setup is what drops a session to the $25–$29 that reviewers consistently report. Against private-clinic pricing in the same town, which runs $64 to $120 a visit at the clinic ranked first in this guide, that is a different order of magnitude, and it is the single strongest argument for trying acupuncture in Round Rock rather than reading about it. Community Impact covered the clinic's five-year anniversary in 2020, placing its opening around 2015, so this is not a pop-up. What you trade is privacy and consultation depth: a shared room is a shared room, and anyone who wants a long one-to-one intake will be better served elsewhere. Three practical caveats before you plan around it. The price comes from reviewer reports rather than a published rate card. The hours we found — afternoons Tuesday and Thursday, mornings Wednesday, Friday and Saturday — come from a directory listing, not the clinic's own site, so call. And the clinic also retails CBD products and doTERRA oils on site, which some readers like to know in advance.

Read the service list and the client profile writes itself: orthopedic bodywork, intra-oral TMJD work, manual lymphatic drainage, craniosacral therapy, advanced cupping, sports and athletic recovery, reflexology, prenatal and couples sessions, wrapped in recovery amenities — cold plunge, infrared sauna, red light, BrainTap. That is a narrower, more clinical vocabulary than the relaxation-first menus elsewhere in town, and it lines up with the town Kraken actually sits in: a Dell-heavy workforce carrying jaw and upper-back tension, and a recreational-sports population attached to Dell Diamond and Old Settlers Park. It carries a 5.0 across 230 Birdeye reviews, the highest rating-plus-volume combination in this guide. One thing is deliberately unresolved. A 2023 Community Impact article about a "Kraken Wellness Center" expansion lists acupuncture among the services, while the studio's own referrals page describes sending clients to an outside acupuncturist. Those two signals point in different directions, and neither is stale enough to discard, so this guide ranks Kraken as a massage studio and does not count it toward the town's dual-modality total. If acupuncture in the same building matters to you, one phone call resolves it — we could not.

Franchise massage gets dismissed reflexively, which is a mistake in a market whose defining local story is licensing. Elements posts its establishment license numbers — ME2874 and EE868472 — directly on its own site, publishes a price range, runs a public explainer on what a massage costs in Round Rock, and opens Monday to Saturday 9am to 9pm and Sunday 10am to 7pm with walk-ins accepted. That is the widest published schedule we verified in this town, and for anyone whose real constraint is a 7pm meeting rather than a modality preference, mechanics beat philosophy. Verification of the reviews needs care. The 9.2-out-of-10 figure comes from the studio's own site aggregator, and the count shifted between our fetches (5,022 to 5,041); the independent corroboration is Groupon, at 4.7 across 747 reviews, which is a real number from a platform with no stake in the score. Pricing is partial rather than absent: a $49–$99 range appears on site without a stated session length, and a third-party summary quotes $189 for 90 minutes and $258 for two hours. No acupuncture at this or any Elements location.

Moe Marvi works alone, and publishes the paperwork that makes that defensible: Texas Board Certified Massage Therapist, Certified Manual Lymphatic Drainage Therapist, license #MT126513, trained at the Lauterstein-Conway Massage School in Austin. In a guide whose organizing question is who is actually licensed to do what, a therapist who volunteers the number before being asked earns a place on the list. The bench is clinical rather than general: Vodder-technique lymphatic drainage, oncology massage, orthopedic and Fulcrum deep-tissue work, myofascial release, TMJ, sports and prenatal. There is a published explainer answering the prenatal-safety question directly, which is the kind of thing a solo therapist writes when the question comes up in the room every week. The limits are the ordinary limits of a one-person practice, stated plainly: one calendar, Monday to Friday 10am to 8pm and weekends 10am to 6pm, so a cancellation is a wait rather than a reassignment. Rates live on a separate prices page we could not fetch, and no aggregate rating or review count could be verified from any source — the credentials are the verified part, not the crowd score. One address detail worth publishing precisely: Suite 1002.

This is Austin's spa economy arriving up I-35. The parent brand has operated in Austin since 2005 and, per the company's own site, opened Round Rock as its fourth Austin-area location in 2023 — bringing a polished day-spa format, daily 9am-to-9pm hours, and a named medical team on the med-spa side (Aisha White, MD as medical director, with Punam Bhakta, APRN, FNP-C). For a reader who wants massage as part of a longer appointment with skincare or injectables attached, no independent studio in Round Rock offers that combination. Three qualifications keep it out of the top half of this list. Its published massage pricing — $140 to $225 for prenatal and deep tissue — comes from brand-wide pages rather than a Round Rock rate card, so treat those figures as indicative. Its Yelp presence is split across two separate listings (4★ across 87 reviews, and 4.7★ across 82), a listing-hygiene problem that makes the true review picture harder to read than the headline Google figure suggests. And the med-spa menu is cross-sold alongside the massage menu, so a client who wants a therapeutic hour and nothing else should confirm what has actually been booked.

Ashiatsu is the reason to know this studio exists. Barefoot, weight-assisted deep pressure is a distinct technique rather than a marketing label, and Tao is the only Round Rock studio in our set that lists it. Around that sit Swedish and deep tissue with hot stone, reflexology and aromatherapy add-ons, self-reported 12-plus years in business, Vagaro online booking, and one of the largest independent review footprints in town at 165 Google reviews and 159 on Yelp. Its position on the North I-35 frontage road makes it one of the easier stops for anyone commuting the corridor rather than crossing town. Two things a reader should weigh. The Better Business Bureau lists Tao as non-accredited with a B− rating, citing one filed complaint the business did not respond to — a single data point, published here because it is a matter of public record and takes thirty seconds to check yourself. And prices do not appear on any source we fetched, so the rate is a phone call or a Vagaro page away. Hours run 10am to 8pm Tuesday through Saturday, closing at 5pm Sunday and Monday.

Location is the strategy, and Satori says so out loud: it markets itself as three minutes from Kalahari, and it books daily from 10am to 9pm through Square. For a family staying at the waterpark resort whose evening opens up unexpectedly, that combination — walkable-adjacent, late, bookable from a phone without a call — solves a problem the resort spa solves at roughly twice the price. The menu is generalist in the useful sense: full-body and foot massage, couples sessions, sports, therapeutic, relaxation, hot stone, prenatal, body glow and reflexology, at 4.7 stars across 75 Birdeye reviews. Two facts belong in the decision. The studio opened in October 2022 and changed management in August 2023, which means reviews written before and after that transition sit inside the same rating average — read the recent ones rather than the aggregate if consistency matters to you. And no prices appear in any source we fetched; the Square booking page is where the number lives. There is no acupuncture here, which in a town with eleven businesses offering acupuncture is a non-issue unless you were hoping to combine the two in one stop.

Every price ladder needs a top rung, and in Round Rock this is it — which is precisely what makes the resort spa useful even to readers who will never book it. A visitor's published write-up puts relaxation massage at $140 for 50 minutes and $210 for 80, deep tissue at $155 and $225, Himalayan salt stone at $160 and $235, with Mom-To-Be and hot stone ritual services in between. Set that against the $60–$130 hourly band the town's independents cluster in, and the trade becomes legible: you are buying the resort, the salon, the locker rooms and the convenience of not leaving the building. The spa runs 9am to 7pm Monday through Thursday and to 9pm Friday and Saturday, inside the waterpark resort on Kalahari Boulevard. Three caveats. Massage and body treatments are limited to guests 18 and over. The day-spa amenities pass is a separate charge from the treatment itself — roughly $75 per one visitor account — so the sticker price is not the whole price. And those rates come from a visitor's account rather than the resort's own published card, so confirm current pricing when you book.