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Kempner is a small city in southeastern Lampasas County, Texas, at the junction of U.S. Highway 190 and Ranch Road 2313 on the Lampasas River.

The area was first settled in the early 1850s by families named Pickett, and the scattered settlement was known for years as Pickett Valley.

The community's center finally became fixed in 1882, when the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway was built through and the post office was moved trackside and renamed Kempner for Harris Kempner, a Galveston merchant and director of the railroad.

The coming of the railroad doubled Kempner's population almost at once, but the town stayed small — an estimated 103 residents from 1904 into the 1920s and about 420 through the 1970s and 1980s.

Growth tied to nearby Fort Hood pushed Kempner past a thousand residents by 2000, when it counted 1,004 people and fifty-four businesses.

The 2020 census counted 1,146 residents in Kempner living in 443 households, with a median age of about 43 years.

Kempner covers only about two square miles of Central Texas hill country at roughly 1,020 feet in elevation, and its humid subtropical climate brings hot summers and mild winters.

Kempner is part of the Killeen–Temple–Fort Hood metropolitan area, and its students are served by the Lampasas Independent School District.