7 Reasons People Are Leaving Florida in 2026

Florida gained 22,517 residents from other states last year.

Two years earlier, that number was 183,646.

Fewer people are arriving, and the households already there are running numbers on property taxes, condo bills, and hurricane season.

These are some of the biggest reasons people are leaving Florida in 2026.

Note: This is general information, not financial, tax, or insurance advice. Premiums, tax rules, and coverage costs are subject to change.

1. Home Insurance Bill

Ask homeowners on their way out of Florida what broke the deal, and they might mention their insurance bill.

Insurify, a commercial insurance marketplace, priced average Florida coverage at $8,292 a year for 2025 and projects $8,458 for 2026.

Those are modeled quotes rather than what homeowners paid at renewal, and the studies that measure it differently still land in the thousands.

That’s before mortgage payments.

A few hundred thousand homeowners did get a break this year: Citizens Property Insurance cut personal lines rates an average of 8.7% at renewal, after regulators tripled the cut the company had asked for.

Citizens has dropped below 400,000 policies from more than 1.3 million in 2023, so most homeowners never got that decrease.

They opened a renewal from a private carrier instead.

2. Newcomers Pay Higher Tax Bills

Buy a house in Florida today, and your property tax bill starts where your neighbor’s stopped years ago.

Save Our Homes limits how much the assessed value of a homesteaded property can rise each year, to 3% or the inflation rate, whichever is lower.

So the neighbor who signed in 1995 keeps a discount that newer buyers never got.

Two nearly identical 1987 houses in Tampa’s Virginia Park show the gap: The long-time owner pays $3,151 a year while the recent buyer pays $4,778.

Statewide, Floridians paid about $24 billion more in property taxes in 2024 than in 2019.

Voters decide Amendment 3 in November, which would lift the homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028 on everything but school taxes.

Move in after January 2027, and you start at $50,000 and wait five years for the rest.

3. Condo Reserves Came Due

Florida condo owners are listing their units over a bill that didn’t exist five years ago.

Owners of any building three or more habitable stories tall pay for a milestone inspection, which is a structural checkup by a licensed engineer.

They also owed a structural integrity reserve study, an engineer’s estimate of what the roof, the concrete, and the plumbing will cost to replace, by December 31, 2025.

Then came the part that shows up in the monthly statement: Associations have to fund whatever that study turned up.

Boards can’t vote those reserves away anymore, though the 2025 law raised the price tag that makes an item reservable from $10,000 to $25,000.

Owners can also vote to pause or reduce contributions for up to two annual budgets after a milestone inspection, and only through 2028.

Somebody still pays the bill.

Buyers can see the squeeze in the listings, where condos and townhouses carried an 8.1-month supply of unsold units in June against 4.5 months for houses, per Florida Realtors.

4. Health Coverage Got Expensive

Early retirees and self-employed households opened a very different premium notice in Florida this year.

The enhanced tax credits that held down Affordable Care Act premiums expired at the end of 2025.

Floridians buy more marketplace coverage than residents of any other state, as the public radio station WLRN reported from the federal enrollment data.

Sign-ups came to about 4.5 million for 2026, down from 4.7 million a year earlier, or roughly 200,000 fewer people.

Nobody budgeted for that.

A 58-year-old contractor with two more years until Medicare has one lever left, and that’s a job with benefits attached to it.

5. Rent Rose Faster Than Pay

Florida's statewide median rent reached $1,719 a month by 2023.

It was $1,238 in 2019, according to the University of Florida's Shimberg Center for Housing Studies.

That's a difference of nearly $500 a month.

The same researchers counted 904,635 lower-income renter households handing a landlord more than 40% of what they earn.

About 64% of those households live in the nine most populous counties, from Duval down through Miami-Dade.

Renters 55 and older make up 39% of the cost-burdened group, up from 29% in 2010, and few of them can raise their income to match.

6. Storm and Heat Fatigue

Weather is the reason many Floridians give for leaving the state.

Researchers put numbers on it.

Florida Atlantic University surveyed 1,400 residents in September 2025, and 36% said they had already moved or were considering a move because of weather hazards.

Sixty-three percent named stronger hurricanes as a worry, and 61% pointed at heavier rain and storm surge.

In July 2025, Tampa hit 100 degrees for the first time in a record that reaches back to the 1890s.

Forecasters had logged 99 degrees many times and never triple digits.

Stack a few evacuation orders on top of a July like that, and some households stop rebuying the plywood.

7. Pay Trails Home Prices

What does the median household in Florida earn?

About $77,700 in 2024, roughly 4.7% under the national median and 26th among the states.

The median single-family sale price reached $432,000 in June, up 4.9% in a year, per Florida Realtors.

The math got harder.

Fortune put Marion County's median home value near $275,000, against about $397,000 statewide on that same measure.

Marion's population grew 3.4% last year, while Collier County managed 0.1%.

Move an hour inland and the house becomes affordable, and you pay for it in windshield time on US-301.

Where the Movers Go

Households that give up on Florida don't scatter at random.

The Census Bureau's five-year survey averages, covering 2020 through 2024, put the yearly outflow at about 506,200 people and the inflow at 573,900.

Those averages stretch back across the boom years, which is why the gap looks wider than last year's net figure of 22,517.

Georgia drew roughly 52,400 of the movers over that stretch, Texas 52,200, and North Carolina 33,600, before you count anybody heading the other way.

Georgia shares the state line.

All three sit within a day's drive of it, which matters when you're moving a whole household rather than a carload.

Counties Losing Residents

Miami-Dade lost nearly 73,000 more residents to other counties and states than it took in last year, the biggest domestic loss in Florida, per the University of Florida's Shimberg Center.

Broward, Orange, Hillsborough, and Pinellas all posted net domestic outmigration too.

That's five big counties.

Polk County, meanwhile, has ranked among the nation's top five for domestic migration five years running, adding between 22,000 and 34,000 movers from elsewhere in the country each year since 2021.

Pasco recorded the state's second-highest gains.

About 59% of the people who landed in Polk and Pasco between 2021 and 2023 came from other Florida counties, going by the Internal Revenue Service filings those same researchers reviewed.

Many of them only moved an hour.

What Keeps Florida Growing

Florida is still growing.

The reason has almost nothing to do with other states anymore.

Net domestic migration came to 22,517 people in the year ending July 2025, down from 183,646 two years earlier, per the Census Bureau.

International arrivals added 178,674, more than any other state received, and that's what lifted the total gain to 196,680.

Deaths will soon outnumber births.

Florida's Office of Economic and Demographic Research projects about 50,000 more deaths than births a year by 2035, so growth after that has to come from people moving in.