Nearly half of Florida’s residents have thought about leaving the state, not because of the weather or the politics, but because of what it costs to stay. That finding comes from a Florida Atlantic University poll conducted by the university’s Business and Economic Polling Initiative, with fieldwork completed in early 2025 among a statewide sample of adults. The poll’s sample size and margin of error were not published in the publicly available summary. The finding is now the centerpiece of a broader analysis released in early 2026 by Florida TaxWatch, the nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, which argues that two forces are doing more damage to household budgets than any other: property insurance premiums and rent.
The TaxWatch report pulls together federal inflation data, state regulatory filings, and national cost-of-living indices to make a case that will sound familiar to anyone who has opened a renewal notice lately. Florida’s decades-old reputation as an affordable alternative to high-tax northeastern states is eroding, and the erosion is measurable. “The cost advantages that once defined Florida are being consumed by insurance and housing expenses that far outpace national norms,” the analysis states.
Florida’s affordability edge is narrowing against Sun Belt peers
Florida now ranks as the 18th most expensive state overall and the 4th most expensive in the South, according to the cost-of-living index published by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center. MERIC calculates composite scores each quarter using price data across housing, groceries, utilities, transportation, and health care; the ranking TaxWatch cited reflects the Q3 2025 release, the most recent available when the report was prepared. A decade ago, Florida consistently scored below the national average. That cushion has largely vanished.
The shift is sharpest when Florida is stacked against the Sun Belt states competing for the same migrants and employers. Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina all carry composite scores below the national average in the MERIC index. Florida’s has climbed above it. Texas and Georgia pair lower housing costs with no or limited state income taxes of their own, which narrows the gap that once made Florida the default destination for cost-conscious movers. North Carolina’s overall score also remains lower than Florida’s, even though the state levies a flat income tax. The comparison drives home TaxWatch’s central argument: Florida’s cost position relative to its closest competitors has weakened.
Federal price data at the metro level tells the same story. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a Consumer Price Index for the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area on a bimonthly schedule. In the most recent release available when TaxWatch prepared its report, the housing component was growing faster than broader regional inflation, meaning shelter costs were outpacing the overall basket of goods and services even as headline inflation moderated.
South Florida mirrors the pattern. BLS figures for the Miami metro area show housing-related expenses leading the inflation charge, reinforcing the idea that this is a statewide phenomenon rather than a quirk of one corridor. Population growth that has added hundreds of thousands of new residents since 2020, paired with constrained housing supply, keeps upward pressure on prices in both markets.
Insurance premiums: Florida’s outlier problem
Property insurance is where Florida diverges most dramatically from the rest of the country. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation maintains a public data portal with residential market reports documenting a steady climb in statewide average premiums. By 2024, the average Florida homeowners policy cost roughly $6,000 a year, approximately triple the national average, according to modeled estimates from the Insurance Information Institute. Those estimates are consistent with OIR filings showing multiple carriers seeking double-digit rate increases. More recent OIR filings through early 2026 have not yet shown a statewide average decline, though individual carriers have filed modest rate adjustments in both directions.
TaxWatch frames insurance as the single largest line-item increase in Florida household budgets, surpassing even rent growth in percentage terms for many homeowners. The reasons are well documented: the state’s hurricane exposure, a litigation environment that until recently inflated insurer losses, and the retreat of national carriers from the Florida market. Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the state-backed insurer of last resort, saw its policy count swell past 1.2 million in 2023 before legislative reforms began pulling some policyholders back into the private market. By late 2025, Citizens reported the count had dropped, though it remained elevated by historical standards.
The reform effort centers on SB 2A, passed during a December 2022 special session, and follow-up legislation including HB 1A in 2023. Those bills targeted one-way attorney fee provisions and assignment-of-benefits abuse that regulators blamed for inflating claims costs. Several insurers have entered or re-entered Florida since 2023, and Citizens’ exposure has started to shrink. But premium relief has been slow to reach homeowners. Rate decreases, where they have occurred, have been modest, and many policyholders are still absorbing the cumulative effect of years of sharp increases. Flood insurance adds another layer: FEMA’s Risk Rating 2.0, which recalculated premiums based on individual property risk, has pushed costs higher for many coastal and low-lying homeowners on top of their windstorm and homeowners policies.
Rent growth that outpaces wages
Renters face a parallel squeeze. The TaxWatch report draws on the Zillow Observed Rent Index, a widely used dataset tracking median asking rents for new listings. A methodology overview hosted by the University of South Florida confirms the ZORI series and its coverage from 2015 through 2025.
The trajectory is stark. Asking rents in several Florida urban counties surged during and immediately after the pandemic-era housing boom. While the pace of increase has slowed from its 2022 peak, rents have not retreated to pre-pandemic levels. In metros like Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville, median asking rents remain well above where wage growth alone would place them, leaving many tenants spending a larger share of income on housing than the 30 percent threshold federal affordability guidelines recommend. The TaxWatch report does not publish specific dollar figures from the ZORI for individual metros, instead focusing on the percentage growth trend relative to wages.
The ZORI tracks new-listing prices, not what existing tenants pay under longer leases, so it does not capture every dimension of the rental market. But it does reflect the price floor renters encounter when they move or renew, and that floor has risen substantially. For lower-wage workers in tourism, hospitality, and retail, the gap between paychecks and rent is especially acute.
The no-income-tax offset is losing ground
Florida’s lack of a personal income tax has long been its most powerful recruiting tool, drawing retirees, remote workers, and businesses from higher-tax states. But the TaxWatch analysis raises a question that more residents are asking out loud: at what point do rising insurance and housing costs cancel out the tax savings?
The FAU poll offers one answer. About 90 percent of respondents said they were at least somewhat concerned about inflation, and nearly 50 percent said they had considered moving because of cost-of-living pressures. The publicly available poll summary describes the sample as a statewide group of adults but does not disclose the sample size or margin of error. As FAU researchers noted in the summary, “the financial strain is not limited to any single demographic; it cuts across age groups, income levels, and regions of the state.” Those numbers suggest the tax advantage, while real, is no longer enough on its own to keep affordability concerns at bay for a large share of the population.
A rough illustration sharpens the point. A household earning $100,000 in a state with a 5 percent income tax saves $5,000 a year by living in Florida. But if that same household pays $4,000 more in property insurance than the national average and $3,000 more in annual rent or housing costs, the tax savings are more than wiped out. The exact math varies by region, income bracket, and whether someone owns or rents. Coastal homeowners paying the highest premiums face a different calculus than inland renters, and high earners saving tens of thousands in avoided state taxes experience the tradeoff differently than service-sector workers earning $40,000 a year. TaxWatch highlights the broad trend; the household-level arithmetic depends on where you live and what you earn.
Whether SB 2A reforms and new housing supply can reverse the trend
The forces driving costs higher have not disappeared. Hurricane risk is a permanent feature of the state’s geography, and reinsurance markets remain expensive even after a relatively mild 2024 storm season. New housing construction is picking up in some fast-growing metros, but supply additions take years to meaningfully shift the balance between demand and availability. Condo owners face an additional burden: structural inspection and reserve-funding requirements enacted under SB 4D after the 2021 Surfside building collapse have triggered special assessments running into tens of thousands of dollars at some older buildings, adding yet another cost pressure the TaxWatch report does not fully explore.
Meanwhile, regulators and lawmakers are still debating whether further intervention is needed to accelerate insurance premium relief beyond what SB 2A and HB 1A set in motion. The data assembled by TaxWatch, drawn from federal price indices, state insurance filings, and independent rent trackers, points in one direction: Florida is becoming more expensive to live in, and the gap between its costs and those of competitor Sun Belt states is narrowing. The roughly 23 million people weighing whether to stay will be watching to see if the policy changes already in motion deliver results before the next round of premium notices and lease renewals arrives.
