The short answer
At today's Miami prices and rents, owning does not overtake renting within 30 years.
An earlier version of this page said year 5. That was wrong, in two compounding ways, and both are worth explaining rather than quietly editing — they are the most instructive mistakes on this site.
| Input | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Typical home value | $570,162 | Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), single-family homes only, smoothed & seasonally adjusted (Metro_zhvi_uc_sfr_tier_0.33_0.67_sm_sa_month.csv) (July 2026) |
| Typical single-family rent | $3,441 / month | Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), single-family residences, smoothed (Metro_zori_uc_sfr_sm_month.csv) (July 2026) |
| Effective property-tax rate | 1.57% | 16.9317 mills (unincorporated Miami-Dade, 2025 adopted) with Florida's homestead exemption: 6.6330 school mills on price − $25,000, plus 10.2987 non-school mills on price − $50,000. On a $570,162 purchase that is $8,973 a year — 1.5738%, rounded to 1.57% to match the two-decimal precision we use for the ACS rates. Millage varies across the metro: Miami-Dade tax districts run from 14.94 to 24.32 mills, and Broward and Palm Beach set their own. Why not the Census ratio: Florida's Save Our Homes cap limits assessed-value growth to 3% a year for homesteaded owners and resets to market value on sale, so the ACS median-over-median ratio (0.88%) describes long-tenured capped owners rather than a buyer's day-one liability. For the record, that ratio is 0.88% — $3,570 median taxes paid ÷ $405,600 median home value for CBSA 33100, per US Census Bureau, American Community Survey — tables B25103 (median real estate taxes paid) and B25077 (median home value), metro level (2023 5-year estimates).Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser, 2025 adopted millage rates (tax district 3000, unincorporated county); homestead exemption per Florida Department of Revenue PT-113 (2025 adopted millage) |
| Homeowner's insurance | $6,145 / year | Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Mean of the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation's county averages for homeowners policies including wind, as reported in the Market Intelligence Report on 31 March 2026: Miami-Dade $5,975, Broward $6,136 and Palm Beach $6,323. OIR computes each as total with-wind premium divided by with-wind policies in force. It publishes no policy counts by county, so the three are averaged unweighted — they sit within 6% of each other, so any weighting moves this by less than $100. OIR does not publish average insured value by county, so what coverage this premium buys is unknown; it is the average over every homeowners policy written in the tri-county area. Condominium policies are a separate column and are excluded — a Miami condo averages $2,801, and this page prices a house. This page previously published $15,301, a quoted premium from a rate-comparison sample at a fixed $300,000 of coverage. Quotes run above what insurers actually write, so we moved to the written figure.Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, Property Insurance Stability Report (July 2026) — average premiums charged for homeowners insurance by county, including wind, from the Market Intelligence Report. Counties per US Census Bureau / OMB, Core Based Statistical Area delineation — central counties of each CBSA (July 2023); the quoted premium it replaced per Insurance.com (Quadrant Information Services) average annual homeowner's premium by ZIP code — $300,000 dwelling coverage, $300,000 liability, $1,000 deductible, 2% hurricane deductible in Florida; averaged over the CBSA's central counties and weighted by owner-occupied units (August 2026) (as of 31 March 2026) |
The two corrections
We were pricing the wrong house. Our rent figure has always been Zillow's single-family series — what it costs to rent a house. Our price was Zillow's all-homes index, which blends houses with condos and co-ops. In most metros those two indices sit close together and the mismatch is invisible. Miami has an unusually large condo stock, so its all-homes index runs far below the price of an actual house: $570,162 for a single-family home against $477,769 all-homes. We were comparing the rent of a house to the price of something cheaper, which made buying look better than it is.
We were using the seller's tax rate, not the buyer's. More on this below, but the short version: our old figure was 0.88%, and 0.88% is what long-tenured Florida owners pay, not what you would pay. We now publish 1.57%.
Correcting the first moved the price up 19%. Correcting the second nearly doubled the annual tax bill. Together they move Miami from the second-fastest buy case in our set to a metro where owning never catches up inside 30 years.
Why Miami lands here
Start with insurance. A Miami owner pays $6,145 a year on our figures — about $512 a month, roughly 1.1% of the home's value annually, and about three and a half times the $1,737 national average for the same policy form.
That figure has moved twice, in opposite directions, and both moves were corrections rather than updates. It went up when we stopped publishing a Florida state average against a metro page — the state number blends this coastline with the panhandle and the interior. It has now come down a long way, because the metro-matched figure we replaced it with was a quoted premium and Florida is where the gap between quoted and written premiums is widest. See the note below; this is the largest correction on the site.
Miami rents are genuinely high relative to prices: a typical single-family rental is $3,441 a month against a $570,162 house, a price-to-rent ratio of 13.8. That is still on the cheaper end of our set, and it is the reason Miami looked like a strong buy on the old numbers.
But high rent has to cover an exceptional annual bill. Property tax at 1.57% runs $8,952 a year, and insurance another $6,145. Together that is about $1,258 a month in tax and insurance alone — more than three times what a Pittsburgh owner pays on the same two lines — before a dollar of principal, interest, or maintenance.
Month one: $4,620 to own versus $3,456 to rent — a gap of about $1,164, on top of $126,936 in cash to close that the renter still has invested.
A note on insurance figures
Published averages for Florida homeowner's insurance disagree more wildly than for any other state, and the reason is methodological rather than mysterious. Two choices move the number by a factor of three each, and most published figures tell you neither.
Whether wind is covered. A quote written with an ordinary $1,000 deductible in Florida excludes windstorm. The same source prices Florida at $2,557 without a hurricane deductible and $7,136 with one. We publish the inclusive figure, because a Miami homeowner who has not insured against wind has not really insured the house.
Whether it is a quote or a policy. This page used to publish $15,301, which was the average quoted premium across 183 ZIP codes in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach at a fixed $300,000 of dwelling coverage, wind included. It was properly metro-matched and properly wind-inclusive, and it was still two and a half times what people here are actually billed.
We now publish what the regulator says insurers wrote. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation collects premium and policies in force by county through its Market Intelligence Report and divides one by the other. As of 31 March 2026 that is $5,975 in Miami-Dade, $6,136 in Broward and $6,323 in Palm Beach — $6,145 across the three, and wind is included in all of them. OIR publishes no policy counts by county, so we average the three unweighted; they sit within 6% of each other, so the choice moves the figure by less than $100.
Two honest limits. OIR does not publish the average insured value behind those premiums, so we cannot tell you what coverage the money buys — it is the average of every homeowners policy written in the tri-county area, on whatever mix of house values and deductibles people actually chose. And it is homeowners policies only: condominium policies are a separate column at $2,801 in Miami-Dade, and this page prices a house.
The correction is large enough to change the page's shape. Insurance was the biggest single line here and is now the second, behind property tax. If you have a genuine quote in hand, use it — but a quote is not what the average Miami household pays, which is the whole point of this section.
Why we do not use the Census tax rate here
The obvious shortcut for an effective property-tax rate is median real estate taxes actually paid divided by median home value, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. It is a reasonable general-purpose estimator and it cross-checks well against published millage in much of the country — Denver's Census ratio, for instance, lands within 0.04pp of what Colorado's assessment rates and Denver's mill levies produce.
In Miami it is badly wrong, so this page derives the rate instead. Miami was the first page to need that treatment; for a while it was the only one, and for a while after that three of the six pages derived their rate while three still published the Census ratio — including pages linked from this very section. That split is gone. Every metro page on this site now computes the effective property-tax rate on a new buyer's assessed basis, and each one shows the Census ratio beside it so you can see the gap. The rule is written down on our methodology page.
For this metro the ACS ratio is $3,570 against $405,600 — 0.88%, among the lowest we have published anywhere. That figure is systematically depressed by Florida's Save Our Homes cap, which limits annual assessed-value increases to 3% for homesteaded properties. Owners who bought long ago are taxed on an assessed value far below what their home is now worth, and they dominate the median.
When a property sells, the cap resets. The new owner is reassessed at full market value as of 1 January following the sale. Florida property appraisers say it plainly: never use the seller's tax bill to estimate your own. The ACS ratio is, in effect, a blend of many sellers' tax bills.
So we derive the rate from published millage instead. Unincorporated Miami-Dade's 2025 adopted rate is 16.9317 mills. Applying Florida's homestead exemption — the first $25,000 comes off for all taxing authorities, the second $25,000 comes off for everything except schools — gives 6.6330 school mills on $570,162 less $25,000, plus 10.2987 non-school mills on $570,162 less $50,000. That is $8,973 a year, or 1.57% — nearly double the ACS figure, and about $8,952 at the rounded rate we actually run.
Two honest limits on that number. Millage varies widely across this metro: Miami-Dade's own tax districts run from 14.94 mills to 24.32, and the CBSA also covers Broward and Palm Beach counties, which set their own. And we assume you homestead the property; a second home or an investment property gets no exemption and is capped at 10% rather than 3%. Look up the millage for your specific municipality, apply your own exemption, and put that number in the property-tax field. On a purchase this size, each half-point of property tax is roughly $2,850 a year.
The other assumption
On every other page here, dropping the assumed return on the renter's invested capital from 7% to 5% moves the answer a long way. Miami used to be the exception — on the old insurance figure it stayed off the chart at either return. It no longer is: at 5%, owning overtakes renting in year 9.
That gap between the two returns is worth sitting with. The case against buying in Miami is not mainly about what the renter's capital could have earned — it is about what the house costs to hold. $8,952 in tax and $6,145 in insurance every year is about $1,258 a month that no investment assumption touches. What the return assumption decides is whether the rest of the ownership case can outrun it inside 30 years, and at 5% it can.
Check it yourself
Open this Miami scenario in the calculator →
Related reading: PITI plus HOA and insurance, which matters more in Miami than almost anywhere, and how the break-even year works.