Austin vs St. Petersburg: which should you move to?

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in Austin went from 5,335 in 2022 to 5,046 in 2023, 4,692 in 2024 and 4,221 in 2025, a 10% drop in the last year and 21% in three, and property offenses from 35,035 to 32,900, 32,407 and then 31,011. APD's own NIBRS records for 2025 show aggravated assaults down 13% (3,038 to 2,652), robberies down 5% (835 to 790) and motor vehicle thefts down 26% (5,908 to 4,345), while rapes rose from 501 to 541 and drug offenses, which rise and fall with enforcement, went from 4,097 to 5,256. The 2025 CDE counts were read on 27 September 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised, and APD notes that its open data may differ from its official figures.

What the rates cover: Computed: 4,221 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Austin Police Department (ORI TX2270100) in calendar 2025, divided by the 1,002,632 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 1,000,639 the rate is 422. APD does not publish a total on this definition: its open NIBRS data sort offenses into crimes against persons (19,469 in 2025, of which 9,464 simple assaults and 5,918 intimidation) and crimes against property (44,250, with robbery, fraud and vandalism inside it), so neither of its totals is the FBI's violent or property count. Summing APD's own 2025 records on the FBI's definition gives 4,219, within two of the CDE.

Homicides: 51 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in both the FBI CDE and APD's open NIBRS data, against 66 in 2024, about 5.1 per 100,000 on the city population. APD's assistant chief put the year's homicides at 55 in January 2026 (KUT), and APD's dataset separately lists 14 negligent manslaughters and 7 justifiable homicides, which the FBI does not count as murder. The high point in the CDE series since 2021 is 81, in 2021.

Down, and clearly so in 2025. On the FBI CDE's annual totals violent offenses were 1,622 in 2022, 1,519 in 2023, 1,642 in 2024 and 1,325 in 2025, about 618, 573, 618 and 502 per 100,000 on each year's Vintage 2025 population, so 2025 was 19% below 2024 after three flat years. Property offenses fell from 7,052 in 2023 to 6,528 in 2024 and 5,437 in 2025, down 17% in the last year, with motor vehicle theft more than halved from 917 in 2023 to 407. The department's own figures agree in direction and nearly in count: it reported overall crime down 16% in 2025, 175 robberies against a five-year average of 224, and 406 auto thefts against an average of 735 (Patch). The CDE counts were read on 1 October 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised.

What the rates cover: Computed: 1,325 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the St. Petersburg Police Department (ORI FL0521400) in calendar 2025, divided by the 264,033 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 269,098 the rate is 492. That is close to Boston's 507 and Jacksonville's 514, above Tampa's 375.5 (on the Tampa Police Department's own counts) and Miami's 359, and almost four times Port St. Lucie's 130. The department reports to the CDE as annual totals rather than month by month, and the CDE carries a full year for each of 2022 to 2025 and nothing for 2021.

Homicides: 9 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, about 3.4 per 100,000 on the city population, against Tampa's 17 (4.1), Orlando's 10 (3.0) and Port St. Lucie's 4 (1.5). The department's own count, announced in January 2026, is 10 homicides, which it called the fewest since 1967, when the city had six, and 44% fewer than the 18 of 2024 (Patch, reporting the St. Petersburg Police Department). The CDE series is 16 in 2022, 13 in 2023, 18 in 2024 and 9 in 2025.

BLS counted 1,421,700 nonfarm jobs in the Austin MSA in July 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), up 23,800 or 1.7% on the year. Mining, logging and construction grew fastest (+5.5%), then professional and business services (+3.2%), the largest sector at 294,600 jobs, and other services (+2.7%), while information shrank 4.9% and government, at 201,000 jobs with the state capital and the University of Texas inside it, was flat. The seasonally adjusted series (FRED AUST448NA) was 1,424,000 in August 2026, 1.2% above August 2025. Average weekly wages across the metro were $1,957 in the first quarter of 2026 against $1,654 nationally. Opportunity Austin, the chamber's economic development program, lists Dell Technologies, Apple, Samsung Austin Semiconductor, Tesla, H-E-B, Amazon's fulfillment centers, the State of Texas, the University of Texas, Ascension Seton, St. David's HealthCare and Baylor Scott & White among the employers with 6,000 or more local jobs. bls.gov answered 403 to curl and FRED refused it, so both were read through the web fetcher.

Main sectors: Professional and business services, the metro's largest sector, Technology and advanced manufacturing (Dell Technologies, Apple, Tesla, Samsung Austin Semiconductor, AMD, Applied Materials), Government and education (the state capital, the University of Texas at Austin, the City of Austin), Trade, transportation and utilities (H-E-B, Amazon fulfillment centers), Health care (Ascension Seton, St. David's HealthCare, Baylor Scott & White).

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Tax Foundation puts Texas's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes at 1.40%, and school districts must exempt $140,000 of a homestead's value from their tax, plus another $60,000 for owners 65 or older or disabled, after voters raised the general exemption from $100,000 in November 2025. Part of the City of Austin's own rate, 8.75 cents per $100 of taxable value approved with Project Connect in November 2020, pays for the transit program. In November 2025 Austin voters rejected Proposition Q, a city tax rate increase that would have raised nearly $110 million, by 63% to 37%. The county, school district and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

BLS counted 1,559,600 nonfarm jobs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 14,200 or 0.9% on the year. Private education and health services added the most (+9,700, or 3.8%, to 264,400), then professional and business services (+6,000, or 2.1%, to 288,800) and construction (+1,600, to 99,600), while information lost 1,700 (-5.6%, to 28,600) and federal employment 1,000 (to 30,900). The city's own employment picture is a headquarters town's: the ten principal private employers in its 2025 financial report, led by Raymond James (4,800), Johns Hopkins All Children's (2,800), Power Design and Jabil (1,700 each), employ 17,837, or 12.5% of the 147,705 people working in the city, against 20,300 for the 2016 list, which then included HSN, FIS and Bayfront Medical. Much of the commercial activity is in the Gateway area in the city's north, which it shares with Pinellas Park (Wikipedia). Unlike Port St. Lucie, most residents work in their own county: 14% of the city's workers (20,739 of 144,736) worked outside Pinellas County in 2024, 21.3% worked from home, and the mean commute for the rest was 25 minutes, with 5% spending an hour or more (ACS 2024 1-year, B08007, B08013, B08301 and B08303).

Main sectors: Finance and insurance: Raymond James, headquartered in the city and its largest private employer with 4,800 staff, Franklin Templeton (1,200) and the credit union service organization PSCU (800), in a metro with 142,400 financial activities jobs in August 2026, Health care: Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital (2,800 staff), BayCare's St. Anthony's Hospital (1,437), HCA (1,350) and Orlando Health Bayfront Hospital, in a metro sector (private education and health services, 264,400 jobs) that added 9,700 jobs over the year, Manufacturing and engineering: Jabil, the electronics manufacturer headquartered in the city (1,700), Catalent Pharma Solutions (800) and Power Design, an electrical contractor (1,700), Utilities: Duke Energy Florida, headquartered in the city (1,250 staff), Tourism, arts and sports: the Dali Museum, the Pier, seven miles of public waterfront parks, the Rays at Tropicana Field and the IndyCar Grand Prix on downtown streets (leisure and hospitality, 167,300 metro jobs).

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Tax Foundation puts Florida's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes at 0.78%, and a homestead exemption takes as much as $50,000 off a permanent residence's taxable value, with the Save Our Homes limit on how fast its assessment can rise (Florida Department of Revenue). A St. Petersburg home paid 19.9197 mills for 2025 on the Pinellas County Tax Collector's published total, of which the city's own rate is 6.4525; a little above Tampa's 19.8428 in the same layer. On 17 September 2026 the City Council voted 6 to 2 to keep the city rate at 6.4525 mills for fiscal 2027, the rate it has levied since fiscal 2025, which is above the 6.3854-mill rolled-back rate and so needed a two-thirds vote; rising taxable values, about $39.3 billion, bring the city about $14.8 million more (St Pete Catalyst). Zillow's typical home value for the city was $355,759 in June 2026, down 3.9% on the year, and its typical rent $2,058; the bills, insurance and flood exposure that follow from them belong to the housing layer.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Texas is one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (KFF, August 2026). It had the highest uninsured rate of any state in 2024: 16.7%, or 5,152,427 of 30,799,312 people, against 8.2% nationally and 12.0% in Georgia, the next highest, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates. The City of Austin's rate was 13.0% and Travis County's 12.6%. Ascension Seton runs Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas, the teaching hospital of UT's Dell Medical School, in partnership with Central Health; it is the region's only adult Level I trauma center and serves 11 Central Texas counties. St. David's HealthCare, a partnership between HCA Healthcare and two local nonprofits, has more than 160 sites and calls itself the Austin area's fourth-largest private employer, and Baylor Scott & White joins both systems on the chamber's list of employers with 6,000 or more local jobs. UT and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation are building the UT Dell Medical Center, with a new UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, beside Dell Seton on the former Frank Erwin Center site, to open in 2030; the UT System put the plan at $2.5 billion when it was announced in August 2023. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Austin ISD, which covers 230 square miles in the middle of the metro, counted 65,951 students in fall 2026, down 3,765 from 69,716 in 2025-26 and from 72,702 in 2024-25. More than 6,400 students enrolled at the end of last year did not return, and the district fell more than 2,000 short of its own projection (Austin Current, 24 September 2026); district officials told KUT that more than half of the 2025-26 loss could be attributed to families' fear of immigration enforcement, with housing costs and falling birth rates also named. In November 2025 the board approved closing and consolidating 10 schools from the 2026-27 school year, affecting 3,796 students and removing 6,319 seats, together with 24 turnaround plans the Texas Education Agency requires for campuses with repeated unacceptable ratings, adopted to head off state-ordered closures or a takeover. The University of Texas at Austin enrolled a record 55,000 students in fall 2025, 44,314 of them undergraduates, the largest total in its history.

Living there

Austin is the Texas state capital and a university town that has become a technology metro, and its growth has outrun what the city has built for it. The metro passed 2.6 million in 2025 after adding 337,554 people since April 2020, but the city grew by less than 5%, and in 2024-25 Travis County lost 6,590 more people to the rest of the country than it gained, so domestic movers now settle in Williamson and Hays counties instead. Inside the city a quarter of workers work from home, 57.5% drive alone and 3.0% take transit, and the one rail line carries about 1,900 riders a weekday. Summer sets the terms of daily life, with a July mean of 85.8F at Camp Mabry and about 29 days at 100F or more in a normal year, and the creeks that cross the city flood fast. Texas takes no income tax and has the highest uninsured rate of any state. The open question is whether Austin can build the transit and keep the schools its growth calls for: voters approved light rail in 2020, and six years later the first 9.8 miles are not due until 2033 and have no federal money, while Austin ISD, down more than 14,000 students in a decade, closed ten schools in 2026.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Florida is one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (KFF). Florida's uninsured rate was 10.9% in 2024 (2,509,782 of 23,038,464), against 8.2% nationally, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates; the City of St. Petersburg's was 7.3% (19,374 of 263,881), below Port St. Lucie's 9.9%, Pinellas County's 9.0% and the metro's 10.0%. The city is the county's hospital center. Orlando Health Bayfront Hospital, the city's oldest, on the site of a five-room hospital of 1910, is Pinellas County's only Level II trauma center and has a Level III regional perinatal intensive care center and the Bayflite helicopter program (Wikipedia). Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, founded in 1926 and part of Johns Hopkins Medicine since 2011, has 259 beds and a Level I pediatric trauma center (Wikipedia). BayCare's St. Anthony's Hospital and HCA's hospitals are also among the city's ten largest private employers (City of St. Petersburg). This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Pinellas County Schools, the countywide district, is shrinking: it reported more than 3,000 fewer students in 2025-26 than a year earlier (Bay News 9), its schools were 68% full against 87% ten years before, and in February 2026 the board voted to close two schools, Cross Bayou Elementary in Pinellas Park and Disston Academy in Gulfport, at the end of the 2025-26 year and to merge others (FOX 13). In higher education the city has the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, a downtown campus of about 6,500 students; Eckerd College, a private liberal arts college founded in 1958; St. Petersburg College, founded in 1927, a state college with four of its eleven campuses and centers in the city; and the Poynter Institute, the journalism school that owns the Tampa Bay Times (Wikipedia). Stetson University's law school is next door in Gulfport.

Living there

St. Petersburg is the smaller and older half of Tampa Bay's urban core: a city of 264,033 on the southern tip of the Pinellas peninsula, with more water than land inside its limits, connected to Tampa by the Gandy and Howard Frankland bridges and to Bradenton by the Sunshine Skyway. It was a railroad town before it was a resort (the Orange Belt Railway arrived in 1888 and the town was incorporated in 1892) and a retirement town for most of the twentieth century; its median age is still 43.0, the second-oldest of the Florida cities here after Port St. Lucie, though Wikipedia notes a younger turn since the Great Recession. Downtown is the draw, with the Dali Museum, the rebuilt Pier, seven miles of public waterfront parks, more than 600 murals and the Rays at Tropicana Field, who returned in April 2026 after Hurricane Milton tore off the roof but will leave: Hillsborough County voted 5 to 2 on 28 August 2026 to put $796 million toward a $2.3 billion stadium in Tampa for 2029 (WUSF). Its economy is a set of headquarters (Raymond James, Jabil, Duke Energy Florida) and hospitals (Johns Hopkins All Children's, Bayfront). The numbers set it apart from its Florida neighbors. It grew only 2.2% from 2020 to 2025 and lost residents in the year of the 2024 storms, in a county that is now losing people. Its median household income, $73,048, is $11,066 below Tampa's; its violent crime rate, 502 per 100,000 in 2025, is higher than Tampa's but falling, and its nine homicides were the fewest the police department has counted since 1967. It has the highest transit share of the Florida cities here outside Miami, at 2.1%. And it learned in 2024 what living in Tampa Bay costs: a record surge from Helene, which drowned twelve people in the county, and 18 inches of rain from Milton two weeks later.