KHOU (channel 11) is a television station in Houston, Texas, United States, affiliated with CBS. It is owned by Tegna Inc. alongside Conroe-licensed Quest station KTBU (channel 55). 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. Houston is the largest television market where the CBS station is not owned and operated by the network.

The station first signed on the air on March 22, 1953, as KGUL-TV (either Gulf of Mexico or seagull). It was founded by Paul Taft of the Taft Broadcasting Co. (no relation to the Cincinnati-based company of the same name nor its associated Taft family). Originally licensed to Galveston, it was the second television station to debut in the Houston market (after KPRC-TV, channel 2), taking the secondary CBS affiliation from KPRC-TV as the network's new primary affiliate, and has stayed aligned with the network ever since. One of the original investors in the station was actor James Stewart, along with a small group of other Galveston investors. The studio was located at 2002 45th Street in Galveston.

In 1956, the original owners sold the station to the Indianapolis-based Whitney Corporation (later Corinthian Broadcasting), which became a subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet in 1971. In June 1959, the station changed its callsign to KHOU-TV (the "-TV" suffix was dropped from the call letters the week following the June 12, 2009, digital transition, as most Belo stations did at the time) and had its city of license relocated to Houston. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license listed both the Houston and Galveston service areas for a time. On April 24, 1960, the station moved to its first Houston facilities at 1945 Allen Parkway, along Buffalo Bayou in the Neartown neighborhood west of downtown Houston.

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. KFDM provided at least grade B coverage to much of the eastern portion of the Houston market, with portions of Liberty County getting a city-grade signal. In those days, the FCC normally did not allow common ownership of two stations with overlapping signals, and would not even consider a waiver for a city-grade overlap.

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. With the addition of stronger syndicated programming including the popular game shows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! (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. In 1998, KHOU became the first television station in the market to begin broadcasting a high definition digital signal.

On June 13, 2013, the Gannett Company announced that it would acquire Belo for $1.5 billion and the assumption of debt, marking the company's entry into the Texas market and ending KHOU's nearly three decades of ownership by Belo. The sale was completed on December 23. Two years later, on June 29, 2015, the Gannett Company split in two, with one side specializing in print media and the other side specializing in broadcast and digital media. KHOU was retained by the latter company, which would be named Tegna.

Being situated near Buffalo Bayou in an area that had become prone to flooding, KHOU's longtime studios had become vulnerable to damage from major hurricanes and severe weather as the Houston area grew exponentially over the last six decades. On the night of June 8, 2001, the station's studios flooded during Tropical Storm Allison, resulting in damage to much of the station's offices including its newsroom. The damage was so severe that the station had to cease its ongoing coverage of the ensuing flash flood emergency (which itself had interrupted regular programming that night) and instead broadcast a West Coast feed of the Late Show with David Letterman, followed by a feed from the station's doppler radar for roughly 90 minutes until the station could resume its breaking news coverage which lasted the entire weekend. 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. The station began wall-to-wall coverage on August 25, 2017, with extensive coverage of the storm's landfall in Rockport (near Corpus Christi). While initial coverage focused on storm damage and cleanup in parts of KHOU's viewing area, by the following Saturday, August 26, massive and continuous rain bands from the Gulf of Mexico led to catastrophic flooding throughout the metropolitan area, with much of the flooding being unprecedented in many places.