Florida has long been the antidote to high-tax, high-cost states — beckoning snowbirds, retirees, hourly workers, and increasingly, younger professionals unable to crack housing markets elsewhere. Between 2021 and 2023, nearly 2.76 million people flocked to the state to transform the southern tip of the U.S. into the third-most populus state in the nation. But the promise of sunshine and opportunity has been replaced by something a little less sunny — rising home prices, diminishing affordability, and growing pressure on infrastructure.

“The last 25 years have seen home prices, homeowners’ insurance, and property taxes surge in Florida,” explains Cotality Chief Economist Selma Hepp. “When you add in the unflagging migration that is straining the state’s public services and inflated costs across the board, the pressure on the quality of life has become so great that it is beginning to tip the balance. Many households are finding it increasingly difficult to stay in the state.”  

The story is familiar. California saw a population exodus spurred by the weight of housing costs, insurance, and faltering infrastructure. Now, Florida — a state once synonymous with getting away — is starting to see signs of people looking to escape. This special report from Cotality investigates whether Florida may become a victim of its own success.

Has growth pushed the state to breaking point?

Like it or not, Florida has become a focal point in America. Following the re-election of Donald Trump into the presidency, Florida was thrust into the spotlight due to Trump’s vested interest in the state’s success. His Mar-a-Lago estate has become a de facto winter White House, and a significant portion of his administration is stacked with Floridians — from Marco Rubio as secretary of state to Pam Bondi as attorney general. The state’s ties to the nation’s capital have strengthened Florida’s economic and political prominence, but it also means the state’s fate is no longer just local.  

But Florida’s popularity is double-edged — its fragile housing market, growing population, aging infrastructure, and environmental threats could test the state’s limits — and there are indications that homebuyers may soon be looking elsewhere.  

Cotality experts highlight two key warning signs shaping Florida’s future: the link between natural disasters, soaring insurance costs, and declining affordability, and the growing tension between business growth and housing availability. These factors signal that Florida’s appeal as a place to put down roots is already changing.  

Migration and the hidden costs of Florida’s housing boom

Florida’s growth isn’t random — it's shaped by who is moving and where they’re coming from. Cotality’s AI-powered database, covering 99.9% of U.S. residential properties, pinpoints the states driving this migration and the impact on housing, infrastructure, and the economy.

New York has long been a pipeline for Florida’s population growth, but migration patterns are shifting. In 2023, California accounted for 6% of new arrivals, signaling a move away from West Coast costs toward Florida’s economic and political influence. Georgia, Texas, and New Jersey also ranked among the top five states sending new residents.

Where are new Floridians coming from?

Top 5 states sending people to Florida in 2023

Data source: U.S. Census Bureau

Similarly, the low-cost living that long defined the state’s lifestyle is disappearing. Newcomers tend to bring wealth with them, which is skewing the state’s housing market in favor of those with big budgets. Baby boomers with cash to spare compete for homes and are making affordability a fiction for younger, middle-income buyers. Between 2018 and 2022, Florida’s housing market was insatiable — Cotality data underscores that during this period sales volume exceeded the 2005 peak.

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Florida home price growth

Tracking median annual prices from 2000 - 2024

Data source: Cotality

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The result? Prices rose far beyond reach.  

“Migration to Florida markets resulted in strong demand for housing and some of the highest rates of home price appreciation since the onset of the pandemic,” says Hepp. “Among the largest U.S. metro areas, Miami tops the list with some of the highest cumulative increases in home prices over the last four-year period. Tampa was a close second.” 

Looking back over the last 25 years reveals even sharper increases. Hepp points to the Naples metro area where prices rose 90% between 2000 and the end of 2024.

A battleground for affordability

The numbers are stark and hard to ignore.

In October 2024, Cotality data showed that Florida’s median home price ($393,500) surpassed the national average. In Miami, where prices have soared fastest, the median listing price sits at $629,575 — 60% higher than the state’s overall figure. Rents, too, have climbed sharply. In August 2024, the median rent price for a single-family home in Miami hit $2,944.  Add to that the state’s inflation and ongoing housing scarcity, and Floridians, nearly a third of whom are renters, are feeling the strain.  

But that hasn’t stopped people moving there.

Florida's Population Growth

Tracking the state’s population trajectory 2015-2024

Data source: Cotality & Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

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In 2023, nearly 1 million people moved to Florida seeking to take advantage of the state’s low-tax, pro-growth policies that align neatly with the new administration’s agenda. So far, that policy approach, coupled with the magnetism of the state, has proved a boon for business.

Miami — increasingly America’s “Magic City” — is flush with new tech investments, billionaires, and high-profile arrivals like soccer player Lionel Messi and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Miami-Dade County has been so profitable that it accounted for 15.15% of the state’s GDP in 2022.

These well-heeled arrivals bring more than just investment. They bring innovation, jobs, notoriety, and tension.  

While Miami has become an economic engine for the state, living there requires much deeper pockets than even five years ago. Magic City residents are now spending 20% more on basic goods than at the beginning of 2020. Housing drags that figure up to 29%, according to Cotality analysis. However, wages in Miami, as tracked by the Fed, only increased 21% during that time.  

Price inflation affects residents differently, and it often depends on when they arrived. Many long-term residents find themselves unable to shoulder those increases and leave. Meanwhile, incoming residents can absorb these higher prices as they earn 59% more on average than the city's median income. This disparity, says Pete Carroll, Cotality’s EVP of Public Policy and Industry Relations, creates a host of opportunities and challenges for both established residents and new arrivals.  

"The influx of high-income residents to Miami over the last few years has fueled economic growth, real estate development, and infrastructure investments, but it has also driven up housing costs and deepened income gaps, making it harder for long-time residents to afford living in the city,” says Carroll. “Recent proposals to eliminate property taxes could further accelerate these trends — potentially attracting even more wealthy newcomers while raising questions about how essential local services will be funded in an already strained housing market."

Miami-Dade’s explosive growth has sent housing and rental costs spiraling and many residents are already asking themselves if somewhere else in the state might be better. Between 2019 and 2023, just over 500,000 people migrated within the state to cheaper markets like Tampa, Jacksonville, and Orlando.  

The search for affordability means that these cities are growing fast — but they too are feeling the strain.

Moving within Florida

Which cities have seen the greatest influx in residents?

‍Data source: U.S. Census Bureau

The conundrum of constructing Florida’s future

New builds, once heralded as Florida’s solution, have faltered. Cotality decoded decades of building activity across the state to establish that permitting activity plummeted by 9.7% in 2022 — its first decline since 2009. Activity fell again by 7.2% in 2023 amid labor shortages, rising material costs, and regulatory delays. Recent price pressures from tariffs only add an additional hurdle for developers who are now hesitating to launch projects.  

Prices reflect this lack of sufficient new construction. According to Cotality’s Home Price Index, Tampa prices increased 52% in the last five years. Jacksonville saw a 50% jump. Even Orlando, where Disney drives employment, struggles with escalating prices. Prices in the area rose 50% between 2020 and 2024.

But new construction doesn’t only pertain to homes. Infrastructure too needs periodic updates to support swelling populations. Each year, Florida adds the equivalent of Tampa’s population. But its roads, schools, and utilities are struggling to keep up which threatens to erode the state’s quality of life.  

Even something as basic as getting around town is becoming difficult. Over the past decade, clogged roads increased commute times by 11.4% despite the state’s investment in expanding and re-engineering existing roads. In Miami and Orlando, traffic is so bad that it costs commuters an extra $1,000 per driver each year just to hurry up and wait.  

Schools are aging too. The average school building is now 31 years old, but resources to rehabilitate these classrooms are scarce. This has in part led to a 36.7% increase in private school enrolment since 2013, which further diverts taxpayer dollars away from modernizing the state’s public schools and leaves families with the choice between accepting aging infrastructure as the standard or paying more for updated facilities; the latter option risks further straining the affordability of many Florida cities.

Drinking water is another limited resource where demand far outpaces the available funds needed to update infrastructure. However, unlike roads and schools, deteriorating water systems pose a significant threat to public health in addition to the public purse. A lack of drinking water can also influence affordability since worn-out infrastructure incurs costs for taxpayers when cities try to balance upgrades and maintenance requirements against existing municipal budgets.

Naturally, not all areas of the state will feel the strain equally. But with Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville attracting both in-state and out-of-state newcomers, it stands to reason that overburdened infrastructure may become a tipping point.

Added to this amalgamation of stressors are hurricanes — intensified by changing weather patterns — which remain an ever-present threat. Hurricane Milton’s near miss in Tampa in 2024 exposed just how vulnerable the state’s success can be.  

Cotality’s Chief Economist explains how the environment can affect the economics of even one of the country’s hottest housing markets.  

“While Florida’s metros have topped the list of hottest appreciating housing markets in recent years, the increasing costs of persistent natural disasters and consequent pressure on insurance expenses and rebuilding costs are starting to weigh on home prices in west Florida,” Hepp explains. “The Cape Coral region, for example, was one of the few markets last year where home prices declined as a result of these issues.” 

In areas severely affected by hurricanes, property values often decline due to extensive damage and the need for repairs or reconstruction. Many less-affluent homeowners have policies that do not cover the full reconstruction value of their house or don’t insure costly items such as pools, decks, or fences. Additionally, homeowners using National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) coverage don’t receive payment for additional living expenses if they must move.  

The result is that some people can’t afford to rebuild their homes. Others can’t afford both additional living expenses and their current mortgage, which can push them into foreclosure. In both scenarios, hurricanes can leave neighborhoods available for wealthier buyers looking for a bargain — albeit a risky one — if they are willing to rebuild.  

The data clearly shows that years of popularity has put Florida under stress. The question is, how much is too much? Do the lack of affordability, aging infrastructure, and red-hot economic growth simply signify growing pains from one of the largest population influxes of the last decade, or are these stressors signs of deeper cracks that will cause the state to buckle?

State lawmakers as well as the business community will need to look at the numbers to make critical decisions to support Florida's new role at the center of the nation’s politics and economy. At the same time, putting Florida on track for sustainable growth will not be a trivial matter, and it will certainly take time.

Time, however, is of the essence. The need to temper the state’s growing pains and alleviate the pressure that could force a new wave of domestic migration is already present. People seeking lives and homes that aren’t shackled to high insurance costs and dwindling support bases, as well as the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters like hurricanes, cannot wait years for a solution to what has become a growing point of concern for many.

Is Florida’s insurance market lost at sea?

The pristine beaches of Florida’s west coast hadn’t been disturbed in generations, and the area was long seen as a pocket of calm amid the state’s storms. The last major storm to hit Tampa Bay was in 1920; Sarasota saw its last storm in 1950 — a fact that hasn’t escaped those looking for calmer waters in a state where both storms and prices seem to be getting more extreme.

And then came Hurricane Milton.  

The storm spun up into a Category 5 hurricane over the central Gulf of Mexico (which was renamed by the Trump administration to the Gulf of America), but Milton missed its worst-case scenario projections when it made landfall just south of Tampa as a Category 3 storm. However, the close call exposed just how vulnerable even Florida’s west coast is to these seasonal storms. Had the storm hit only a few miles north — even accounting for a range of severity scenarios that Cotality modeled — the damage would have been generational.

More people have moved to Tampa in recent years than any other major metropolitan area in the state. In only three years, the city welcomed 155,135 people, which translates to a 2023 population that was 5% bigger than in 2020. This influx also added new homes, increasing the number of structures exposed to hurricanes.

In Tampa, 1.1 million homes have at least a moderate risk of damage from hurricane winds — that’s the second-highest number of at-risk homes in Florida, according to Cotality data. Over 540,000 homes are at risk of storm surge from a Category 5 hurricane.  

Had Milton continued along its forecasted trajectory, it could have caused $133 billion in damage, and rebuilding from the rubble would have taken a herculean effort between homeowners, contractors, and insurance agencies — assuming that homeowners have insurance.  

Hurricane Milton's estimated losses

Estimating insured and uninsured wind and flood losses

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*Flood values include payments for the recovery to home and business owners from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and private insurers

Data source: Cotality

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In the Florida counties of Hillsborough and Pinellas, which cover the greater Tampa area, only 17% of the 1.12 million units in the area are covered by National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) policies in force. This does not account for flood insurance that homeowners have with private carriers; however, it does raise the question as to whether homeowners are sufficiently insured in an area where hurricanes and their accompanying storm surge are part of life.  

For Floridians, insurance goes hand in hand with homeownership. But insuring against risk in this state is becoming extremely expensive.  

Can insurers weather Florida’s storms?

Insurance premiums in Florida increased 60% on average between 2019 and 2023. While homeowners are primarily bearing the burden of rising costs, insurers are also feeling the squeeze. 

The increasing frequency and severity of storms in Florida has pushed up the number of insurance claims in recent years. Couple this with the overall increase in material prices since the pandemic — Cotality data analysis shows that in 2024 concrete was up 7.2% from a year prior, labor cost 3.9% more, and structural steel is 2% more expensive year over year — and it’s fair to wonder if insurers should be concerned about the future of this market.    

Billion-dollar hurricane disasters in Florida are now becoming a reality rather than a worst-case scenario. Since the beginning of the decade, 18 storms that have caused over $1 billion in damages. And it may get worse.  

Over the next 30 years, Monroe, Florida will become the fourth-riskiest place to live in the U.S. for natural disasters due to its extremely high risk of hurricanes, according to Cotality analysis done on Climate Risk Analytics. Looking at the state for where flood, wind, and hurricane risk overlap, Miami and Naples are among the top 3 cities with the greatest number of homes exposed to a triple threat from Mother Nature.

Triple-threat natural hazard risk

Homes with an extreme risk for a combination of three perils

Data source: Cotality

These swelling costs associated with hurricanes should not be underestimated. Doing so could lead to market instability if insurance payouts surpass collected premiums. Just look at California.  

“When insurance carriers lose money, they pull out. Right now, we’re seeing historic cancellations throughout California,” Robert Feldman, the co-founder of WOWS Insurance told Cotality. “And what’s really scary is it’s not just California. The western United States is affected by this, and unless we make changes, it’s not viable. Rates are going to continue to rise and it’s just going to be out of control.”

The West Cost has long battled increasing wildfire risk, which in 2023 led to a slew of insurers electing to no longer write new policies in California. In fact, when Allstate announced it would pause new policies in California, the company said in a statement that “The cost to insure new home customers in California is far higher than the price they would pay for policies due to wildfires, higher costs for repairing homes, and higher reinsurance premiums.”

Already, a similar crisis is brewing in Florida. In the last several years, Farmers Insurance, Bankers Insurance, and Lexington Insurance, a subsidiary of AIG have withdrawn from the state. Farmers Insurance told the New York Times that “this business decision was necessary to effectively manage risk exposure.”

Similarly, AAA said it will not renew some policies, stating that the market has become challenging. “[2022’s] catastrophic hurricane season contributed to an unprecedented rise in reinsurance rates, making it more costly for insurance companies to operate. Prior to that, the market was already strained by increased claims costs due to inflation and excessive litigation,” the company said in a statement at the time.

So where does this leave homeowners? Well, some are already relying on state and federal insurance programs, like the National Flood Insurance Program.

Although flood insurance isn’t required outside of a Special Hazard Flood Area, it doesn’t mean that a home will escape flooding if a hurricane passes through. But having insurance does accelerate the recovery process.

“A hurricane like Milton was inevitable somewhere along this coast, but the thing we can control is how fast we can restore buildings — and part of that means having appropriate level of insurance coverage,” explains Tom Larsen, the AVP of Insurance Product Marketing at Cotality. He says that modeling for future scenarios can help insurers understand the risk of the properties in their portfolios so that resilience measures can be encouraged to help homes withstand these inevitable storms and reduce overall restoration costs.  

 Damages from hurricanes cost the U.S. government eyewatering sums, and with rising disaster costs, questions remain about the long-term sustainability of government-backed insurance programs. Florida alone received $15.29 billion from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) between 2017 and 2019. Just last year, Florida received over $1 billion for remediations following Hurricanes Milton and Debby. And this doesn’t include NFIP policies that were paid out. 

Still, since accessible insurance will remain essential for Florida homeowners, some people are looking for alternative solutions to prevent the insurance market from following in California’s footsteps.

Can building codes serve as a stop gap for underinsurance? 

Hurricane Helene highlighted the devastating consequences of not having flood insurance. At the time of the storm, Cotality estimated that uninsured flood losses were about three times that of industry insured flood loss, which throws the growing insurance gap — and its consequences — into sharp relief.  

While there is no direct substitute for insurance, resilience is a remedy that helps insurers, governments, and homeowners to reduce damages in the wake of a hurricane. Building codes, and their enforcement, is one form of resilience that is already proving its worth in the Sunshine State.  

Florida has some of the best building code adoption and enforcement in the country, and this has saved thousands of homes as well as billions of dollars. However, modern building codes are not necessarily applied retroactively, so millions of homeowners in Florida who live in older residences remain vulnerable to hurricanes.  

Despite the success of stronger building codes in creating more resilient buildings, retrofitting homes to respect modern building codes can be a cost-prohibitive undertaking. In a market already fraught with high prices, adding in pricey code regulations in addition to the looming specter of tariffs on building materials will further drive up home prices and eat into homebuyer budgets and builder margins. Long-term, this could have a domino effect that reduces the number of overall new builds, inflating prices further thanks to competition for existing housing stock.  

“Building codes require a balancing act between costs and resilience,” explains Jay Thies, Cotality’s Vice President of Construction Pricing Intelligence. “In some cases, like upgrading electrical installations for life-safety improvements or meeting requirements for hurricane framing ties, the extra costs are unquestionably worth it — although they do push up overall prices. In other cases, ambiguity exists between the high costs and measurable benefits. In these instances, favoring affordable construction can be a beneficial choice to keep housing accessible to a wider range of buyers.”

While encouraging lower-costs builds is a path to aiding affordability, governments will have to wrestle with whether new housing supply today is worth risking future resilience. Nevertheless, mitigating future losses is a must in Florida where the pressures from these disasters are threatening to unravel the insurance market, and by extension, livelihoods, future migration patterns, and the state economy. Such a domino effect would have consequences on the growing importance of Florida on the national stage. 

 The new administration’s investment in the state only further underscores the national importance of Florida and its stabilization. As it stands, migration patterns indicate that people still want to move here, but as affordability worsens and natural disasters increase in frequency and severity, the question that is top of mind for many is: If not Florida, where?

Is the Great Florida Migration Coming Undone?

Florida was always the state to get away to, not get away from. President Trump’s allies — from political operatives to policymakers — have long pointed to Florida as a model for America with its low taxes, light regulation, and a clear political identity. But the state’s challenges have begun to undermine that narrative.  

Florida’s growth — the underpinning of its success — may not be the bulletproof “brand” story it once was. A perfect storm of housing prices, inflated insurance costs, intensifying hurricanes, and shifting state priorities are beginning to tarnish the myth.  

While Florida still sees more arrivals than departures, that balance is shifting. Mortgage applications from both in-state and out-of-state buyers are declining, and more Floridians are applying for loans elsewhere — particularly in neighboring states.

A Cotality analysis found that Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas are receiving 48% of mortgage applications for those moving out of the Sunshine State. And that choice isn’t random. Florida’s generally less expensive neighbors have comparatively lower exposure to natural hazards.  

States receiving mortgage loan applications from Florida residents

Data source: Cotality

“Florida’s rapid price appreciation combined with soaring home insurance prices and the threat of hurricanes has led people to start looking at other nearby states,” says Hepp. “When people leave, they are staying in the South where there is relative affordability as well as access to large employment centers — they are seeking the ingredients that made Florida so prosperous in the first place.”

Ready or not, here they come

Already there are inklings that enough people are headed to Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas to nudge housing prices northward. Prices in each of these five states, except Texas, outpaced the national average in January 2025, according to Cotality’s Home Price Index.  

Although Texas’ home prices are sluggish compared to January’s national average growth of 3.3%, the state is recalibrating following a housing bubble that began during the pandemic. Plus, like the other southern states where Floridians are heading, the Lone Star State is attracting major businesses, including Tesla’s Gigafactory headquarters and Samsung’s new computer chip manufacturing and research facility, which will power the housing market as tens of thousands of people move to the state in search of jobs. And Texas is not alone in increasing its population thanks to new jobs.

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Cotality geospatial technology identified several parts of North Carolia around the Charlotte area and the Research Triangle as high-growth regions. These regions are showing indications that fresh construction will soon appear to welcome the people moving for the jobs that Apple and Google are bringing with their corporate expansion; Microsoft will also generate more jobs with its plans to build a data center in the state.

The fanfare accompanying new business investment in these southern states echoes Miami’s trajectory. With their expanding job markets, these states may become long-term alternatives to the Sunshine State. But if Miami is a mirror for what investment can bring, these states would do well to look hard at how it is evolving. Without a plan to support an influx of newcomers, housing markets receiving Florida residents could heat up to a fever pitch. That raises the question of whether these states are ready.

Tempering housing prices is only one piece of the puzzle. Add in the ancillary costs of homeownership like insurance and taxes, and affordability could quickly become a mere memory. However, unlike other parts of the U.S., new builds are big business in the South. In 2024 there were 353,000 housing starts in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, combined. Adding these new homes to increase supply could allow these states to accommodate larger populations while stabilizing prices.  

Interestingly, Georgia is receiving the largest percentage of loans from Florida residents applying for mortgages in other states; it is also responsible for sending 7% of Florida’s newest residents in 2023, according to Cotality data. The porous nature of the Florida-Georgia line is indicative of the similar lifestyles, climates, and levels of opportunity available in these neighboring states. However, if Florida’s affordability worsens along with the severity of its hurricane seasons, the transition between the states may no longer be bidirectional.  

Florida remains one of the riskiest states in the nation for natural disasters, but none of the other Gulf Coast states or the Carolinas are immune to the consequences of these catastrophes. In fact, Hurricane Helene — which caused significant losses in Georgia and the Carolinas — highlighted the growing insurance gap. Cotality estimated the gap between insured and uninsured losses to be between $9.5 billion and $12.5 billion at the time of the storm, and such a large gap can hinder the long-term recovery of communities as well as drive up the cost of insurance over time.  

As other states see the first signs of Florida’s exodus, they must shore up their infrastructure and ensure that they have an accurate view of their housing markets and risk landscape so that they don’t follow the path laid by Florida and California. At the same time, Florida may be able to stopper its outflow residents before this becomes a long-term trend. It will all depend on whether the cracks that are showing in the states’ affordability, infrastructure, and insurance network can be filled.

The California playbook

Florida’s trajectory echoes California’s — soaring housing costs, insurance woes, and infrastructure strain. If these trends continue, it will likely follow the same slow-boil exodus.  

In the decade leading up to 2023, 6.5 million people left California. During those years, the total insurance premiums paid in the state rose by nearly 90% and house price trends were similarly heated.

In the mid-aughts, Cotality data shows California’s monthly median sales price rested at $380,501, which was a $25,000 jump from the median sales price in the preceding five years. By 2023, prices catapulted to an average of $621,501.  

As if eyewatering cost increases weren’t enough reason to consider a new home, California’s heavy financial burden coincided with some of the worst natural disasters in the state’s history, which has led to double-digit increases in the cost of insurance — a path that Florida residents are acutely familiar with.

These trends suggest that as the cost of living marches higher, people will respond with their feet. While more affordable areas of the same state are typically the first destination, eventually the financial burden becomes too much and migration patterns bubble over into the wider market. At that point, a state can start losing residents.

Already, Florida residents are looking for less expensive areas of the state to call home.

“Miami’s rapid price appreciation and resulting unaffordability led to the area seeing more homebuyers leaving the area for other Florida cities that remain relatively affordable, such as Port St Lucie, Palm Bay, Jacksonville, and Orlando,” says Hepp.

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Tracking these trends will be essential for those with an interest in Florida’s future. After all, getting a sneak peek into what’s coming next will be key to determining if Florida’s path can be readjusted before the state gets left behind.  

A fragile showcase

Miami offers a cautionary tale: as housing costs soared and infrastructure buckled, it began losing residents. If Florida fails to learn from the Magic City and balance demand, affordability, and resilience, the state’s allure could dim.

The question remains whether Trump’s Florida-first vision will insulate the state or exacerbate its fragility. His administration’s vested interest could pour more fuel onto Florida’s housing bonfire — further straining the very thing that makes the state so attractive to outsiders.

For now, Florida’s growth story isn’t over. But if affordability worsens and storm risks intensify, today’s trickle of outbound movers could become a flood.

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