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

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in Dallas went from 11,181 in 2021 to 10,255 in 2022, 9,025 in 2023, 8,747 in 2024 and 7,674 in 2025, a 12% drop in the last year and 31% in four, and property offenses from 46,991 to 49,224, a peak of 52,641 in 2023, then 45,106 and 40,962, 22% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft drove most of that swing: 11,818 in 2021, 18,457 in 2023 and 11,162 in 2025. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 12% (5,826 to 5,144), robberies down 10% (2,235 to 2,020), rapes down 27% (505 to 370) and murders down 23% (181 to 140). On its own definitions DPD reported violent crime down 12%, robberies down 10%, aggravated assaults down 12% and sexual assaults down 13%. The 2025 CDE counts were read on 27 September 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised.

What the rates cover: Computed: 7,674 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Dallas Police Department (ORI TXDPD0000) in calendar 2025, divided by the 1,329,491 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 1,331,217 the rate is 576. DPD does not publish a total on this definition. The violent crime its Violent Crime Reduction Plan tracks is murder, robbery and aggravated assault, with family-violence and other aggravated assaults counted separately and rape left out. Its public incident dataset on Dallas OpenData, which the city describes as a research copy rather than the authoritative count, lists only 57 murder incidents and 12 family-violence aggravated assault incidents for 2025, so it cannot rebuild either total.

Homicides: 140 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 181 in 2024, about 10.5 per 100,000 on the city population. DPD's own year-end count was 141 homicides against 184 in 2024, a 23% drop (CBS Texas, February 2026); nothing fetched explains the gaps of one and three cases between the two series. The high point in the CDE series since 2021 is 244, in 2023.

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 4,353,400 nonfarm jobs in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA in July 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), up 54,000 or 1.3% on the year. Professional and business services (+3.0%, to 805,200) and leisure and hospitality (+3.0%) grew fastest, then mining, logging and construction and education and health services (both +2.0%), while information (-2.8%), financial activities (-1.0%) and manufacturing (-0.7%) shrank. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 895,000 jobs, and government employs 465,400. The seasonally adjusted series (FRED DALL148NA) was 4,363,400 in August 2026, 1.1% above August 2025. Average weekly wages across the metro were $1,785 in the first quarter of 2026 against $1,654 nationally. The Dallas Regional Chamber counts 21 Fortune 500 headquarters in the region as of 2025 and 44 in the Fortune 1000, among them AT&T, Texas Instruments, American Airlines, Kimberly-Clark, Toyota Motor North America and McKesson.

Main sectors: Trade, transportation and utilities, the metro's largest sector (DFW Airport, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, BNSF Railway), Corporate headquarters and professional and business services (AT&T, Texas Instruments, McKesson, Kimberly-Clark, Toyota Motor North America), Financial activities (the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Charles Schwab, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America), Health care and education (Baylor Scott & White Health, Texas Health Resources, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Children's Health), Aerospace and advanced manufacturing (Lockheed Martin, Bell Textron, Raytheon, Texas Instruments).

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. The City of Dallas's own rate for the fiscal year that starts on 1 October 2026 is 69.78 cents per $100 of taxable value, down from 69.88 cents, the eleventh cut in a row, in a $5.66 billion budget. Proposition U, a charter amendment Dallas voters approved in November 2024, requires the council to put at least half of each year's revenue growth into the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System, with any remainder of that half going to police pay and to a force of at least 4,000 officers; the budget adopted in September 2026 funds 3,651 officers by the end of September 2027 and 3,800 a year later. 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 Dallas's rate was 22.7% (297,684 of 1,313,770), Dallas County's 21.9% and the metro's 16.2%. Parkland Memorial Hospital, licensed for 983 beds, is Dallas County's only public hospital and UT Southwestern's primary teaching hospital; it became the first certified Level I trauma center in Texas in 1983 and runs a burn center. UT Southwestern Medical Center, whose faculty have received six Nobel Prizes, runs William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital in the Southwestern Medical District, and more than half the doctors practicing in Dallas trained there at least in part. Baylor University Medical Center, which opened in 1903 and is now the North Texas flagship of Baylor Scott & White Health, has 914 beds and a Level I trauma center that Baylor Scott & White describes as one of only three adult trauma centers in Dallas. Children's Health and UT Southwestern broke ground in October 2024 on a $5 billion pediatric campus with 552 beds to replace Children's Medical Center Dallas, projected to open in 2031. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Dallas ISD, the second-largest school district in Texas, opened the 2026-27 year on 11 August with about 132,000 students, down from about 134,300 a year earlier (KERA). Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde blamed federal immigration policy in part. KERA adds that charter schools and the state's new education savings accounts may account for some of the loss; more than 2,800 students in the district had qualified for the accounts, which help pay private school tuition, on the Comptroller's latest count. The district made pre-kindergarten free for all 3- and 4-year-olds this year and enrolled about 11,000 children in it, and the Texas Education Agency rated the district B for 2025. Southern Methodist University (12,544 students in fall 2025) is in University Park, a separate town north of downtown, the University of Texas at Dallas is in Richardson, and Dallas College runs seven campuses in Dallas County.

Living there

Dallas is the corporate and financial center of the fourth-largest metro in the country, and the metro is growing around the city rather than inside it. The Dallas-Fort Worth area added 123,557 people in 2024-25, more than any metro but Houston, while the city lost 1,808 and Dallas County lost 46,226 more residents to the rest of the country than it gained, so newcomers settle in Collin, Denton and Kaufman counties. The city has 93 miles of DART light rail and, since October 2025, a commuter line to DFW Airport, yet 68.6% of its workers drive alone and 2.0% take transit. Summer is the hard season: the July mean at Love Field is 87.3F, the warmest of any city this site compares, and the station had 54 days at 100F or more by late September 2026. Hail and tornadoes are the costly weather. Texas takes no income tax, and 22.7% of the city's residents have no health insurance. The open question is whether the city can hold up its end as the region spreads outward: three suburbs won back part of the sales tax they pay DART and a fourth voted to leave, voters wrote a minimum of 4,000 police officers into the charter in 2024 and the adopted budget plans for 3,800 by September 2028, and Dallas ISD began 2026-27 with about 2,300 fewer students than the year before.

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.