The two stations share studios on Westheimer Road near Uptown Houston; KHOU's transmitter is located near Missouri City, in unincorporated northeastern Fort Bend County.

[5] In 1984, Dun & Bradstreet sold its entire broadcasting division, including KHOU, to the Belo Corporation, who spun off its Beaumont station, KFDM-TV (channel 6) in order to comply with FCC regulations at the time.

Known for its ownership of The Dallas Morning News and its flagship TV station in its home city of Dallas, WFAA (historically one of ABC's strongest affiliates and a local news powerhouse in that city), Belo began to make significant investments into KHOU, which had become one of CBS' weakest affiliates during the 1980s under the final years of Dun & Bradstreet ownership.

(both of which were picked up from KPRC-TV) and The Oprah Winfrey Show (which KTRK-TV turned down), the revamping of its news department, and the carrying over of both its Dallas flagship's theme music and popular image branding, The Spirit of Texas, KHOU began to challenge KTRK and KPRC in the local ratings, and eventually became one of CBS' strongest affiliates by the 1990s during a very challenging period for the network.

During Hurricane Ike, which hit the Texas Gulf Coast in mid-September 2008, KHOU's storm coverage was distributed nationwide via DirecTV and XM Satellite Radio, as well as through a live feed on the station's website.

On August 21, 2017, KHOU began covering Hurricane Harvey as the storm was projected to hit the Texas Gulf Coast with extensive rainfall expected in the Greater Houston area.

On the early morning of Sunday, August 27, KHOU was forced to evacuate its studios due to rising floodwaters from the nearby Buffalo Bayou.

The station's brand-new news set (which had debuted in November 2016), weather center, newsroom and master control were destroyed by the floodwaters, which rose up to five feet (2 m) within the building.

The station's staff then evacuated to the nearby Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Houston Branch building on higher ground while a new contingency plan was drafted.

At various times, WFAA, along with Tegna NBC affiliate KUSA in Denver, provided assistance with weather graphics and master control.

For the first month, the station only broadcast its main HD channel while its two subchannels (at the time Bounce TV and Justice Network) remained shut down.

Around the same time, the station's on-air look returned to normal with full news and weather graphics restored and program guide listings on the terrestrial signal.

In December 2017, KHOU announced that it would open a secondary street-side studio at the George R. Brown Convention Center along Avenida Houston.

This setup is similar to that of Dallas sister station WFAA's Victory Park studio, which opened a decade earlier in January 2007.

On March 29, 2018, KHOU announced that it had signed a lease for 43,000 square feet (3,995 m2) of space at 5718 Westheimer Road near Uptown Houston (Galleria area).

The station occupies three floors of the high-rise in facilities that include two studios, two control rooms, an open collaboration space for all content producing departments, technical operations, sales and executive offices.

In 1987, KHOU refused to air a television adaptation of the then-popular Garbage Pail Kids trading card series on Saturday mornings, owing to concerns regarding the show's ridicule of the disabled and its abundance of heavy violence; as a result of these decisions and concerns, CBS decided not to air it on their Saturday morning schedule for the 1987–88 television season, and the series, to date, has never been telecast in the United States.

On September 8, 2015, it began airing The Late Late Show at its network-approved time (11:37 p.m. CT) following Stephen Colbert's debut as host of The Late Show; leaving the station's only CBS preemption being that of the second half-hour of the Sunday morning talk show Face the Nation, which had been tape-delayed to 2:30 a.m. the following Monday morning due to KHOU's longstanding broadcasts of religious programs from Houston-based Lakewood Church and Second Baptist Church, with the former also airing on Sunday night following its 10 p.m. newscast and KHOU 11 Sports Extra (see below).

In 2002, the Houston Texans joined the NFL as the league's 32nd franchise, as part of the American Football Conference's newly formed South Division.

Throughout its existence, KHOU has been widely regarded as a stepping stone for many well-known television news personalities, as many of its reporters have gone on to work for national networks.

KHOU's best known former on-air staffers include former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, NBC News correspondent Dennis Murphy, newswomen Linda Ellerbee and Jessica Savitch, and sports anchors Jim Nantz (now the lead announcer for CBS Sports), Harry Kalas (later a legendary broadcaster for Major League Baseball and NFL Films) and Ron Franklin (later with ESPN).

KHOU also has gained a reputation for its investigative reporting staff (currently known as KHOU 11 Investigates), whose most notable stories include its 2000 investigation into defective tire designs by Firestone – which led to the mandatory recall of Wilderness AT, Firestone ATX and ATX II tires, as well as numerous lawsuits (the defective tires resulted in a number of deaths, including that of KTRK reporter Stephen Gauvain), a story in the early 2000s that led to the shutdown of the Houston Police Department's crime lab, and allegations of dropout rate fraud in the Houston Independent School District, which resulted in the dismissal of several HISD officials.

With a main team consisting of anchors Steve Smith and Marlene McClinton (who the station hired from WMAQ-TV in Chicago), chief meteorologist Dr. Neil Frank and sports director Giff Nielsen (a former Houston Oilers quarterback who became KHOU's lead sports anchor following his retirement from the NFL in 1984), along with a new set, graphics and theme music, KHOU began to mount a serious challenge to its longtime competitors, evolving into a competitive ratings race during the 1990s.

On February 4, 2007, following CBS' coverage of Super Bowl XLI, KHOU began broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition, becoming the first station in the market to do so.

On August 1, 2011, KHOU debuted a new half-hour newscast at 4 p.m. on weekdays to replace The Oprah Winfrey Show;[22] this would expand to a full hour in 2015 after losing the Houston rights to Jeopardy!

The station did not incorporate a picture-in-picture treatment or split-screen format for viewers in Houston to continue watching the game while the weather report was issued.

Twist and Circle were both removed on December 31, 2023; the former was discontinued by Tegna, while the latter transitioned into a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) operation.