El Paso vs Cape Coral: which should you move to?

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in El Paso went from 1,794 in 2021 to 2,109 in 2022, 2,134 in 2023 and a peak of 2,170 in 2024, then 1,969 in 2025, a 9% drop in the last year that still leaves the count 10% above 2021. Property offenses went from 8,882 to 9,440 and a peak of 11,061 in 2023, then 10,246 and 9,152, 17% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft drove much of the swing: 994 in 2021, 2,314 in 2023 and 1,805 in 2025. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 10% (1,628 to 1,467), robberies down 11% (255 to 226), rapes down 6% (267 to 250), burglaries down 19% (959 to 773) and larcenies down 11%, while murders (20 to 26) and arsons (69 to 78) rose. EPPD's own count of the eight offenses, as reported to the state, fell 11% in 2025, but El Paso Matters found it was the only one of Texas's 25 largest law enforcement agencies to report more serious crime in 2025 than in 2021, after rises in 2022 and 2023. The 2025 CDE counts were read on 30 September 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised.

What the rates cover: Computed: 1,969 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the El Paso Police Department (ORI TX0710200) in calendar 2025, divided by the 683,012 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 682,310 the rate is 289. That is the lowest of any US city this site compares, against 375 in Fort Worth, 532 in San Antonio, 577 in Dallas and 890 in Houston, and below Miami's 359. EPPD's own figures, as reported to the Texas Department of Public Safety and summarized by El Paso Matters, put violent crime 10% lower in 2025 than in 2024, in line with the CDE's 9% drop.

Homicides: 26 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 20 in 2024, about 3.8 per 100,000 on the city population, half Fort Worth's rate and a third of Houston's. El Paso Matters, reading the department's report to the state, also has murder rising in 2025, one of only two of the eight tracked offenses that did, with arson. The CDE series is small and uneven: 33 in 2021, 22 in 2022, 37 in 2023, 20 in 2024 and 26 in 2025.

Down, on every count that exists, though no FBI or state count covers 2025. On the FBI CDE's figures violent offenses fell from 403 in 2022 to 277 in 2023, about 185 and 122 per 100,000 on each year's Vintage 2025 population, and January to October 2024 brought 236, which at that pace would be about 2023's level. FDLE's incident-based file, which counts somewhat differently (its forcible sex offenses include fondling, and its assault totals run higher), shows the same direction: 420 violent offenses in 2022, 357 in 2023 and 243 in 2024, about 104 per 100,000 in the last year, and property offenses from 2,555 in 2023 to 1,980 in 2024. For 2025 there is only the department's own word: it reported overall crime down 28% in the first half of the year, 1,487 cases against 2,076, with thefts down from 850 to 612 and no homicides (Cape Coral Police Department), and its 2025 annual report claims a 28% reduction for the year and calls the city the second-safest in Florida of those over 150,000, without publishing the counts behind either. The CDE counts were read on 2 October 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September, and why the department's data stop at October 2024 was not found.

What the rates cover: Computed: 277 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Cape Coral Police Department (ORI FL0360200) in calendar 2023, divided by the 227,458 Vintage 2025 estimate for July 2023; on the CDE's own agency population of 228,672 the rate is 121. 2023 is used, not the 2025 the other Florida profiles use, because it is the last calendar year the FBI carries in full for this department: the CDE has every month of 2022 and 2023, January to October 2024, and nothing from November 2024 on, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's incident-based (FIBRS) offense file, the state system that feeds the FBI, has the department for every month of 2022 to 2024 and not at all for 2025 or 2026. No FBI rate exists for 2025, as for Orlando after 2022. On 2023's figure Cape Coral has the lowest violent crime rate of the Florida cities this site compares, a little below Port St. Lucie's 130 for 2025, a third of Miami's 359 and a quarter of St. Petersburg's 502.

Homicides: 2 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2023 in the FBI CDE, about 0.9 per 100,000 on the city population. The CDE series is 4 in 2022, 2 in 2023 and 5 in January to October 2024; FDLE's file has 4, 4 and 5 for the three full years. The department reported no homicides in the first half of 2025, against three in the first half of 2024 (Cape Coral Police Department). Port St. Lucie had 4 in 2025, St. Petersburg 9 and Tampa 17.

BLS counted 363,500 nonfarm jobs in the El Paso MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 3,200 or 0.9% on the year. Professional and business services grew fastest (+3.5%, to 44,500), then leisure and hospitality (+2.5%, to 44,600), construction and mining (+1.8%) and manufacturing (+1.1%, to 18,400), while information (-4.5%) and local government (-1.3%, to 47,000) shrank and private education and health services held at 56,000. Unlike in Fort Worth and San Antonio, federal employment rose, 3.0% to 13,800; BLS's payroll count does not include active-duty soldiers. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 80,200 jobs and government the second at 70,900. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48213400000000001) was 365,200 in August 2026, 1.2% above August 2025. The Texas Comptroller counts 41,527 direct employees at Fort Bliss in 2025 and estimates the base supported 121,220 Texas jobs and $17.3 billion of the state's GDP ($29.1 billion of output). The border is the other half of the economy: in 2025 the Bureau of Transportation Statistics counted 13.1 million personal vehicle passengers and 5.4 million pedestrians entering at the El Paso port, second on the Mexican border only to San Ysidro for both, and 641,729 trucks at Ysleta-Zaragoza, fourth after Laredo, Otay Mesa and Hidalgo. The largest new investment is Meta's AI data center in Northeast El Paso, a $10 billion project as El Paso Matters described it in May 2026, which the city expects to become its largest property taxpayer, at about $15 million a year once fully built in 2028, with 300 permanent jobs (El Paso Matters).

Main sectors: Military and federal government: Fort Bliss, home of the 1st Armored Division, the largest installation in the Army's Forces Command, with 41,527 direct employees in 2025 (30,288 of them active-duty), and the federal border agencies (US Border Patrol's El Paso Sector, Customs and Border Protection, the El Paso Intelligence Center), Health care (University Medical Center of El Paso and the El Paso County Hospital District, Texas Tech Health El Paso, William Beaumont Army Medical Center), Cross-border trade, transportation and logistics with Ciudad Juárez and its export factories, the metro's largest sector by payroll jobs (80,200 in August 2026), The ports of entry: the downtown Paso del Norte, Stanton Street and Bridge of the Americas crossings, Ysleta-Zaragoza and Tornillo, which together took 842,659 trucks and 28.8 million people into the US in 2025, Education and local government (UTEP, El Paso Community College and the El Paso, Ysleta and Socorro school districts); government is the metro's second-largest sector at 70,900 jobs.

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. On 18 August 2026 a divided City Council adopted a $658.6 million general fund budget for fiscal 2027 and a rate of 79.8 cents per $100 of taxable value, both 6 to 2, which El Paso Matters says will raise the city's bill on the average-value home by about $105; the council had adopted the no-new-revenue rate every year before 2025, and the city manager's proposal at the voter-approval rate would have added $132. The county adopted its no-new-revenue rate of 45.1 cents, about $41 more on a $229,637 home, and the hospital district proposed its no-new-revenue rate of 23.7 cents. El Paso's rates are among the highest of Texas's big counties, but its home values are among the lowest: an El Paso Matters analysis of Tax Foundation and Census data found the county's median property tax bill took 6.1% of median household income in 2024, about the same share as in most large Texas counties and less than in Travis County, where the median bill was 111% higher. The county, school district, hospital district, community college and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

BLS counted 311,300 nonfarm jobs in the Cape Coral-Fort Myers MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 1,500 or 0.5% on the year. Private education and health services (+1,500, or 2.8%, to 55,400) and leisure and hospitality (+1,500, or 3.8%, to 41,200) added the most, then professional and business services (+1,100, or 2.5%, to 45,900), while government lost 2,400 (-7.8%, to 28,500), all of it in local government (down 10.6% to 20,300), and mining, logging and construction 300 (to 40,900). The city's own employment picture is a commuter town's: the ten principal employers in its 2025 financial report, led by the school district (2,563), Lee Health (2,015), the City (1,969) and Publix (1,370), employ 10,442, about 9.5% of the people working in the city on the City's count, and the list is almost unchanged from 2016's except that a regional VA clinic and Lowe's have left it and the water park and the Westin have joined. Most residents work elsewhere: 54% of the city's workers (58,022 of 108,333) worked outside the city in 2024, though only 9.8% (10,604) outside Lee County, against 40% for Port St. Lucie. 16.3% worked from home, and the mean commute for the rest was 32 minutes, seven more than St. Petersburg's, with 11% spending an hour or more (ACS 2024 1-year, B08007, B08008, B08013, B08101 and B08303).

Main sectors: Construction and real estate: mining, logging and construction held 40,900 of the metro's 311,300 nonfarm jobs in August 2026, 13%, about twice the share in the Tampa-St. Petersburg metro, in a city still building out lots platted in the 1950s and 1960s and rebuilding after Ian; Home Depot (559) is among the city's ten largest employers, Health care: Lee Health, the county's hospital system and Cape Coral Hospital's operator, is the city's second-largest employer (2,015 staff in the city), in a metro sector (private education and health services, 55,400 jobs) that added 1,500 jobs over the year, Retail: Publix (1,370 staff in the city), Walmart and Sam's Club (700) and Home Depot, in a metro with 42,500 retail jobs, Public schools and government: the Lee County School District (2,563 staff in the city, the largest employer), the City of Cape Coral (1,969) and the City's own charter school system (371), while metro local government lost 2,400 jobs over the year, Leisure and tourism: Sun Splash Family Water Park (300) and the Westin resort (200) among the city's ten largest employers, boating on the canals, and the beaches of Sanibel and Fort Myers Beach nearby (leisure and hospitality, 41,200 metro jobs, up 3.8% on the year).

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 house in the City of Cape Coral (Lee County taxing district 057) paid 15.3806 mills for 2025 on the Lee County Property Appraiser's millage book, of which the City's own rates are 5.1471 for operations and 0.1608 for its voted parks bond. The total is low partly because there is no fire district line: the City pays for fire service with a per-parcel assessment that, with stormwater and solid waste, comes on the same bill and is not reduced by any exemption. On 22 July 2026 the City Council voted 7 to 1 to cap the fiscal 2027 operating rate at 5.1988 mills, the rolled-back rate, on a taxable value of $33.1 billion, with final adoption set for 24 September (Gulfshore Business). The Royal Palm Coast Realtor Association's single-family median for its Cape Coral region was $389,950 in August 2026, up 6.1% from $367,500 a year earlier, while Zillow's typical home value for the city was $335,825, down 3.9%, and its observed rent $1,949; the bills, assessments, 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). 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 El Paso's rate was 20.8% (138,104 of 665,393), El Paso County's 21.5% and the metro's 21.5%. University Medical Center of El Paso, run by the El Paso County Hospital District, is the county's only public hospital and the region's only Level I trauma center; it has 394 licensed beds and in fiscal 2024 counted 97,326 emergency visits and more than a million outpatient visits. The district, which also runs El Paso Children's Hospital, has budgeted $136 million of uncompensated care for fiscal 2027 on a $2.1 billion budget, citing the end of the enhanced ACA subsidies, and voters approved a $397 million bond for it in 2024 (El Paso Matters). UMC is the teaching hospital of Texas Tech Health El Paso, formerly Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, independent since 2013, whose Paul L. Foster School of Medicine was the first four-year medical school on the US-Mexico border; it also runs schools of nursing, biomedical sciences and dental medicine, the last of which took its first class in 2021, and is planning the Fox Cancer Center, which it calls the first comprehensive cancer center in far West Texas. William Beaumont Army Medical Center, the Army hospital at Fort Bliss, moved into a new 1.1-million-square-foot complex on East Fort Bliss in July 2021 and runs the emergency department for Northeast El Paso (Wikipedia). This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Four school districts cover parts of the city, El Paso ISD, Ysleta ISD, Socorro ISD and Canutillo ISD, and nine serve the county (Wikipedia). All of them are shrinking: El Paso County lost almost 12,000 residents aged 5 to 18 between 2020 and 2025, 6.6%, and the three largest districts had about 124,000 students in 2025-26, 13% fewer than seven years earlier (El Paso Matters). El Paso ISD lost almost 1,900 students in 2025-26 against a budgeted 1,000, ran a $52.8 million deficit, and on 4 June 2026 its board declared financial exigency to cut about 410 jobs, after which two trustees resigned; it has postponed a bond election to May 2027. Ysleta ISD adopted a budget that nearly empties its savings. The University of Texas at El Paso, an R1 research university, has 26,297 students, 85% of them Hispanic and half the first in their families to attend college, and calls itself the leading Hispanic-serving university in the country. El Paso Community College, with five campuses, enrolled 25,563 credit students in fall 2024, 81.7% of them Hispanic (EPCC Fact Book). Texas Tech Health El Paso trains doctors, nurses and dentists beside UMC.

Living there

El Paso is the only city this site compares on the Mexican border, the only one in the desert, and the only Texas city here on Mountain time, an hour behind the rest of the state, half of a metropolis whose larger half, Ciudad Juárez, is across the Rio Grande: 28.8 million people crossed into the US at its three ports in 2025. It is also the one Texas city here that is not growing. It lost 2,219 residents in 2024-25, the most of any city in the state, and has grown 0.6% since 2020, as births fall, fewer people move up from Mexico and young adults leave for better pay; household income, at $59,932, is the lowest of any city this site compares, and 20.8% of residents have no health insurance. Fort Bliss and the border agencies anchor the economy, with health care, trade and the schools. Its violent crime rate, 288 per 100,000 on the FBI's counts for 2025, is the lowest of any US city here, with 26 homicides. It is built for the car, with 0.9% of workers on a bus network that runs four Brio rapid lines and a free downtown streetcar. The climate is the driest and sunniest here, with 8.78 in of rain a year, and the hottest summers are recent ones: 70 days at 100F in 2023 and 108 straight days at 90F or above in 2026. The open questions are water and money: the Rio Grande reservoir that supplies nearly half the city's water fell to 1.4% of capacity in July 2026, a divided council raised the city's property tax rate in August, El Paso ISD declared financial exigency in June as enrollment falls, and the city is counting on Meta's data center, due to become its largest property taxpayer, to take some of the load off homeowners.

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, against 8.2% nationally, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates; the City of Cape Coral's was 9.4% (21,762 of 232,206), below Lee County's 13.2% and close to Port St. Lucie's 9.9%. Hospital care in the county is Lee Health's: the system, which runs four acute care hospitals and two specialty hospitals, was a public special district until Lee County approved a mission agreement on 28 October 2024 and it became a private nonprofit, Lee Health System, Inc., on 1 November 2024, bound by that agreement to go on providing safety-net care (South Florida Hospital News). Its hospital in the city is Cape Coral Hospital, whose emergency department grew to 56 treatment spaces in January 2026, and Lee Health opened a walk-in care center at Bimini Square in south Cape Coral in late 2025 (South Florida Hospital News). Lee Health is the city's second-largest employer, with 2,015 staff in the city (City of Cape Coral). This file did not verify a bed count for Cape Coral Hospital or a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

The Lee County School District, the countywide district, counted 87,107 students in its own schools and 13,329 in charter schools in 2025-26, and lost 1,946 students from the year before, mainly to home education, private schools, other Florida districts and moves out of state or country; the zone that takes in Cape Coral was at 94% of capacity (Cape Coral Breeze). Its four high schools in the city are Cape Coral (late 1970s), Mariner (1987), Ida S. Baker (2005) and Island Coast (2008). The City runs its own municipal charter school system, the Oasis schools (Cape Coral Charter Schools on the City's employer list, 371 staff), with two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school open only to children who live in the city and charge no tuition (Wikipedia; City of Cape Coral). Higher education is across the river: Florida Gulf Coast University, established in 1991 and opened in 1997, with almost 15,000 students in 2017, and Florida SouthWestern State College, whose main campus is in Fort Myers (Wikipedia). Cape Coral Technical College, run by the school district, is in the city.

Living there

Cape Coral is a land sale that became the largest city between Tampa and Miami. In 1957 two Baltimore developers, Leonard and Jack Rosen, bought a 103-square-mile tract across the Caloosahatchee from Fort Myers for $678,000, and their Gulf American Land Corporation sold its lots at free-dinner sales events in 24 states, dug canals without state permits (which later bankrupted it) and paved streets ahead of the people (Wikipedia). The result, incorporated in 1970, is a grid of single-family houses on more than 400 miles of canals, more than any other city on earth by Wikipedia's account, some of them with access to the Gulf, and the same platted-lot history Port St. Lucie has on the other coast. It is as suburban as any of the Florida cities here: 79.2% of homes are owner-occupied, 0.2% of workers take transit, the median age is 48.0, the oldest of the seven, and more than half of its workers leave the city for work, nearly all of them for elsewhere in Lee County. It grew 21.8% from 2020 to 2025, second only to Port St. Lucie among large US cities, entirely on people moving in. Its household income, $85,584, is second to Port St. Lucie's; its violent crime rate, 122 per 100,000 in 2023, the last year the FBI has, is the lowest of the Florida cities here; and its sales tax, 6.5%, is the lowest. Its risk is the Gulf. Hurricane Ian came ashore on Cayo Costa, off Pine Island west of the city, in September 2022 at 150 mph, put 6 to 9 feet of water over the ground in Cape Coral and Pine Island, and drowned 36 people in Lee County in its surge.