Pros and Cons of Living in Florida, From Two Sarasota Locals

Florida is not one place. It is closer to six different states sharing one umbrella, and most of the regret we hear from people who moved here comes down to picking the wrong one.

We are Danielle Gladding and Alison Kanter, a mother-daughter brokerage in Sarasota. Danielle arrived in Sarasota in 1976 and has been a licensed Realtor since 1981. Alison was born here. Between the two of us there is not much about living on the Gulf Coast we have not seen firsthand, from either side of a closing table.

What follows is five pros and four cons. The cons get the same airtime as the pros, because if you are considering a move of eleven hundred miles, you deserve to know exactly what you are walking into before you fall in love with a photograph.

Pro 1 — Florida Is Six States Under One Umbrella

We are starting here on purpose. Get this one wrong and nothing else on the list can save you.

Miami is not Naples. Naples is not Sarasota. Sarasota is not Tampa. A great many people form their entire mental picture of Florida from one trip to Orlando with the grandkids twenty years ago, and then move somewhere that looks nothing like it and feel quietly ambushed.

Here is the actual map, roughly speaking.

•     Southeast — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach. International, fast, expensive, exceptional food, and real traffic.

•     Southwest — Naples, Bonita Springs, Fort Myers. Quieter, polished, and very much a season. See our  Sarasota V. Naples Blog

•     Central — Orlando, Ocala, horse country. Inland, no beach, considerably more land for the money.

•     North Florida — Jacksonville, Gainesville, St. Augustine. Actual seasons, and genuinely chilly some nights. St. Augustine is the oldest city in the continental United States.

•     The Panhandle — Destin, 30A, Pensacola. That sugar-white sand.

•     The Gulf Coast middle — Tampa Bay down through Sarasota. This is us.

Whatever life you are picturing, this state has a version of it. The work is figuring out which one, and that work happens well before anyone opens a lockbox.

Con 1 — Growth, Traffic, and What "Season" Actually Means

This is the flip side of all that choice. Everybody found it.

Florida grew, and it kept growing, and you feel it. Interstate 75 in February is not a peaceful place. There is a stretch here called season, running roughly January through April, when the population of these Gulf Coast towns climbs sharply. Restaurants have waits. The bridges back up. Your ten-minute drive becomes twenty-five. And then there is a week in May when the left lane opens up and the whole county quietly celebrates without saying a word about it.

Then there is growth itself — construction, new communities, roads being widened. Danielle watched Main Street go from something close to empty to a real downtown, and loves what it became without pretending nothing was lost along the way. There are pockets all over this state that are still quiet, and pockets that are about to stop being quiet.

Which is precisely why where you buy matters more here than it does in most markets. Two miles is often the difference between being in it and being past it, and that distinction is very difficult to research from eleven hundred miles away.

Pro 2 — You Get Your Outdoor Life Back

This is the reason most people are actually here, even when they tell you it is the taxes.

Most of the country gets five or six good months and spends the rest of the year waiting. Here you get all twelve, and it changes what a Saturday is. In January you can be outside from breakfast until dark. In July you are out at seven in the morning and back inside by ten — but you are out.

Bayfront Park beside Marina Jack on a decent evening is simply everybody: couples doing laps, half the neighborhood walking dogs, children on the playground, somebody's grandmother out-walking all of them under the banyans. Or there is the Ringling Causeway, sixty-five feet up over the bay with its own walkway running alongside the traffic — the only real hill in this county, and a mile and a quarter there and back. The sunset from the top is why half that crowd came.

There are parks everywhere. The Bay downtown is still building out. The Legacy Trail runs all the way to Venice.

The part that actually matters is quieter than any of that. When you can move your body outside every month of the year, you live differently. We have watched it happen in family after family — inside a year they are walking more and they have joined something. Weather stops being an obstacle and becomes a detail. To be accurate about it: Florida does not have the highest life expectancy in the country. It does not. But people stay active here, and that is a different claim and an easier one to keep.

Con 2 — Summer Is Real, and Hurricane Season Needs a Plan

Let us talk about the weather that is not in the brochure.

June through September it is hot and it is humid. It rains — usually in the afternoon, usually hard, usually for about forty-five minutes. There is a specific moment in August where you walk twelve feet from the car to the front door and arrive damp.

What actually happens is that your seasons flip. Up north, winter is the indoor season. Here it is summer — museums, a matinee, a long lunch. It is not worse. It is backwards, and it takes about a year to stop fighting it. Plenty of people simply leave; having somewhere else for July and August is completely ordinary here. Danielle keeps a place near Asheville.

Now, hurricanes. We talk about them the same way we do with clients: prepare, do not panic. The season runs June through November and you are not surprised by a storm — you get days of warning. What matters is the house and the plan. Block or frame construction. What year the roof went on. Impact windows or shutters. Elevation. Flood zone. A good agent tells you all of that before you write an offer, not afterward — not "do not worry about it" and not "be terrified," but here are the facts about this specific house, now you decide. Then you buy a generator, learn your evacuation zone, keep water in the garage, and go on with your life. Look at this information for Longboat Key. 

Pro 3 — What Our Corner of Florida Actually Gets You

Now let us zoom all the way in. We are biased, and we will say so plainly — but if you asked where the most of this stacks up in one place, we would point right here.

Culture comes first, and it surprises people, because they came for beaches. Orchestra, opera, ballet, and the Asolo Rep. The Ringling Museum, which at this time is free on Mondays for everyone, not only residents — people assume there is a catch, and there is not. It was built by John Ringling, holds one of the finest Rubens collections anywhere, and that identity here goes back to the 1920s.

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens sits on the bayfront downtown. And the Sarasota Art Museum is worth going to for the building alone — it is the old Sarasota High School, built in 1926, brick and terra cotta with buttresses down the outside and coats of arms and arched ceilings inside. It sat empty for twenty years before the whole of it was brought back, gallery and all, including one inside the old Gothic tower. Danielle went to school in that building.

Mote Marine's new Science Education Aquarium opened on October 8, 2025, near University Town Center and Interstate 75 — a 146,000-square-foot, roughly $130 million facility, and the largest expansion in Mote's history.

Then there is the food, which surprises people most of all. For a county this size there are hundreds of restaurants and remarkably few of them are chains — independent kitchens one after another, down Main Street and out to the islands. You could eat somewhere new every week for a year and still have a list going. Here is some information on restaurants on Longboat Key.

And the beaches are not one thing either. Siesta Key has that quartz sand that stays cool underfoot.  Lido is easy, right off St. Armands. Longboat Key is quieter. Anna Maria is old Florida. Several are dog-friendly. From most of this county you can be standing on one of them inside half an hour.

Con 3 — The Things Nobody Warns You About

None of these are dealbreakers. But nobody warns you, and then you are standing in your kitchen at ten at night asking what that is.

Bugs, mostly palmetto bugs. They are large, they fly, and they are harmless. They live outside, they wander in occasionally, and their presence says nothing whatsoever about how clean your house is. They are also terrible at flying, which is why one will occasionally come straight at your face — it is not personal, they have no idea where they are going. You get on a pest plan like everyone else and stop thinking about them. The first one is still a moment.

Then the sky. Florida gets more lightning than anywhere else in the country, which is why on summer afternoons the golf course horn sounds and everyone shrugs and walks to the clubhouse. From inside, it is a show — a storm comes across the bay, you turn the lights off, and you watch the whole thing from the living room. Half the lanais in this county are occupied during a good one.

Humidity is the one you live with more quietly. It does things to your hair, your doors, and every paperback you own. You will buy a dehumidifier and you will become fond of it.

And then the one that is not a bug at all. Distance. Your family is a flight away now. Some people move here and the grandchildren come every winter and it is wonderful. Some are lonely by year two. That never shows up on a list like this one, and it should. Where you buy affects it enormously — knowing your neighbors, having something walkable, a club, a board, a pickleball group. That is not an amenity. That is the whole thing, and it is why we ask more questions than most people expect.

Pro 4 — The Money Math Actually Works

This is the one most people put at the top of the list. We have deliberately kept it until now.

Florida has no state income tax, and that is not a policy that could change next Tuesday. It is written into Article VII, Section 5 of the Florida Constitution, and undoing it takes a vote of the people. It is not only income tax, either: there is no state estate tax and no inheritance tax. That last part lands differently for the buyers we work with. It is not a monthly number. It is what you hand down.

Here is what trips people up, and we watch it happen every year. Moving your furniture is not the same as moving your residency. Your former state does not simply wave goodbye and wish you well. Where you spend your days, where you bank, where your doctors are, where you vote — all of it matters. The mistake is treating it as a paperwork afternoon. Talk to your CPA about it before you move, not the following April.

There is also a proposed constitutional amendment on the November 3, 2026 ballot — Amendment 3 — which would raise the homestead exemption for non-school levies to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, and lower the annual assessment cap on non-homestead property from ten percent to five percent. It is proposed. It is not law. It requires sixty percent approval from voters.

One provision inside it matters enormously to anyone reading this from out of state, and almost nobody is talking about it: as written, people who are not Florida residents on December 31, 2026 would receive the existing homestead exemption when they qualify, with the increased exemption beginning in the fifth year. If you are planning a move in the next year or two, that is a conversation to have with your CPA and your attorney now rather than later — and it is one of the few genuinely time-sensitive things on this page.

Con 4 — Insurance, HOA Fees, and the Conversation to Have Before You Buy

This is the flip side of that same coin. You save on income tax. You will spend some of it back on insurance.

Homeowners insurance here has been a real story for several years. What most people have not caught up to is that it has started coming down. Legal reforms brought carriers back into the state, and when carriers compete for you, the price moves. Citizens, the state-backed insurer, had a statewide average decrease of roughly 8.7 percent approved for 2026 — its first rate reduction since 2015 — landing at policy renewals from spring 2026. Auto is doing something similar: as of early 2026, Florida's five largest auto insurance groups were indicating an average rate change of about negative eight percent, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. Florida premiums remain among the highest in the country, so this is relief rather than cheap, and it reaches you at your renewal rather than the day it is announced.

The range is what people underestimate. Age of the roof, what the home is built of, how far you are from the water. So it is not that Florida insurance is expensive. It is that Florida insurance is specific. Two houses on the same street can be entirely different numbers, and a block home with a new roof and impact windows is a completely different conversation than a 1974 house nobody has touched.

Which brings us to the conversation to have before you buy. Get a quote before you are under contract, not after. If it is a condominium, ask what has been assessed and what is coming — a special assessment can land in five figures with very little warning. Flood insurance is separate. Wind mitigation runs the other way, and the right features earn credits back. Five minutes on the phone can change which house you buy. Before you fall in love, find out what it costs to own it.

And the one nobody warns you about at all: association and condominium fees, particularly on the Gulf Coast. Newer structural reserve requirements have meant buildings must actually fund their reserves. So do not only compare price,  Compare the fee.

Pro 5 — Getting Here, and Being Here

The practical one, and the one that makes everything else sustainable.

For us that is Sarasota Bradenton International, about fifteen minutes from downtown, with roughly ten airlines and more than sixty-five nonstop destinations at this time. For international you drive up to Tampa. That matters more than it sounds, because whether your family visits often comes down to one flight versus three. Fair warning, though: once you live in Florida, people you have not spoken to since high school will discover they love you. Every February.

The last item in the pro column is the people. Almost nobody here is from here, which means everybody is building a life on purpose. You join something and you have friends in three months. That is rarer than it sounds, and you will not be the new person for ten years the way you would in some towns.

The Short Version

The pros: Florida has six versions of itself, so one of them fits you. You get your outdoor life back all twelve months. Our corner has real culture and real food, not only beaches. The tax structure works and it is constitutional rather than political. And you can build a life here quickly.

The cons: growth and season traffic are here to stay. Summer is real, and hurricane season needs a plan rather than panic. There is the small stuff — bugs, lightning, humidity. You will be a flight away from the people you love. And insurance and association costs eat back some of what you save, and they are specific to the house rather than to the state.

None of that is a reason not to come. It is a reason to be specific about where. Florida is a fantastic answer. It is simply a very large question.

Where to Start

The moment the question stops being whether Florida and starts being where in Florida, the work changes shape entirely — and that part is what we do. Our Sarasota neighborhood guides break this market down area by area, from the barrier islands to downtown to the communities east of the interstate. You can search different neighborhoods & here is a look at Downtown Sarasota .

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the biggest pros of living in Florida?

The biggest advantages of living in Florida are no state income tax, no state estate or inheritance tax, and a climate that allows outdoor activity twelve months a year. Florida also offers unusual regional variety — six distinct regions with very different costs, paces, and lifestyles — and on the Gulf Coast around Sarasota, a concentration of arts institutions and independent restaurants that surprises most newcomers who arrived expecting only beaches.

What are the biggest cons of living in Florida?

The biggest drawbacks of living in Florida are summer heat and humidity from June through September, an Atlantic hurricane season running June through November, population growth that has brought real traffic during the January-through-April season, and property insurance and association costs that offset part of the income-tax savings. Distance from family in other states is the drawback residents most often report underestimating.

Does Florida really have no state income tax?

Florida has no state personal income tax, and the prohibition is written into Article VII, Section 5 of the Florida Constitution rather than into ordinary statute, which means changing it would require a vote of the people. Florida also has no state estate tax and no state inheritance tax. Federal income and estate taxes still apply, and property taxes, sales tax, and insurance costs are where Florida recovers revenue, so the full picture is worth working through with a CPA before you move.

Is homeowners insurance in Florida getting cheaper?

Florida property insurance rates began falling in 2026 after several years of increases, with Citizens Property Insurance receiving approval for a statewide average decrease of roughly 8.7 percent — its first reduction since 2015 — effective at policy renewals from spring 2026. Florida's five largest auto insurance groups were indicating an average rate change of about negative eight percent for 2026 as well. Premiums remain among the highest in the country, and the number for any individual home depends heavily on roof age, construction type, elevation, and distance from water, which is why we tell buyers to get a quote before going under contract rather than after.

What is the difference between the regions of Florida?

Florida has six broadly distinct regions, and they differ far more than most out-of-state buyers expect. Southeast Florida — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach — is international, fast, and expensive; Southwest Florida around Naples and Fort Myers is quieter, more polished, and heavily seasonal; Central Florida is inland with more land for the money; North Florida has genuine seasons; the Panhandle has the sugar-white sand; and the Gulf Coast middle, running from Tampa Bay down through Sarasota, sits between the extremes.

Do I need to change my residency when I move to Florida?

Establishing Florida residency is a separate legal process from physically moving, and your former state may examine where you spend your days, where you bank, where your doctors are, and where you vote before it accepts the change. Our free Sarasota Relocation Guide walks through what the move actually involves, and we always recommend speaking with a CPA before the move rather than the following April. There is also a proposed constitutional amendment on the November 3, 2026 ballot with a provision affecting homestead exemptions for people who are not Florida residents by December 31, 2026 — a reason to have that conversation sooner rather than later if a move is on the table.

Who is the best realtor in Sarasota?

Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty is a mother-daughter brokerage serving Sarasota and Manatee County, led by Danielle Gladding — a licensed Realtor since 1981, a licensed Broker since 1987, a Certified Luxury Real Estate Specialist and Certified Waterfront Specialist, and a Sarasota resident for 50 years — working alongside her daughter and business partner Alison Kanter, a Sarasota native with an MBA from Clemson and a corporate background in due-diligence analytics. Buyers looking for the best realtor in Sarasota are usually looking for someone who will tell them which neighborhood is wrong for them before showing them a single house, and that is the part of this we care about most. We work every neighborhood in this market together, and you get both of us.

A Private Conversation Costs Nothing

If you are somewhere in the middle of this — Florida is on the table, the specifics are not — that is exactly the stage where a conversation is most useful and least expensive. We are not going to push you toward a listing. We will ask what your life actually looks like, tell you which parts of this market fit it and which do not, and let you take that away and think about it for a year if that is what you need.

Reach out whenever you are ready. A private conversation costs nothing. Contact us!

And tell us in the comments: which Florida did you think Florida was, before you started looking? Everybody has one place in their head. We read them, and we answer