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

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in Houston went from 28,850 in 2021 to 26,383 in 2022, 25,517 in 2023, 26,758 in 2024 and 21,345 in 2025, a 20% drop in the last year and 26% in four, and property offenses from 97,068 to a peak of 105,522 in 2022, then 104,829, 100,302 and 92,382, 12% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft rose from 15,694 in 2021 to 20,085 in 2023 and fell to 12,516 in 2025. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 19% (18,341 to 14,839), robberies down 24% (6,359 to 4,859), rapes down 20% (1,729 to 1,377) and murders down 18% (329 to 270). HPD's own year-end counts show the same direction: homicides down from 331 to 272, robberies from 6,438 to 4,987 and aggravated assaults from 18,590 to 15,378 (Major Cities Chiefs Association survey, as reported by the Houston Chronicle). 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: 21,345 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Houston Police Department (ORI TXHPD0000) in calendar 2025, divided by the 2,397,315 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 2,413,559 the rate is 884. HPD's year-end figures as reported to the Major Cities Chiefs Association and quoted by the Houston Chronicle run slightly higher than the CDE's: 272 homicides, 4,987 robberies and 15,378 aggravated assaults, against 270, 4,859 and 14,839. The Chronicle did not give HPD's rape count, so HPD's own total on the FBI definition could not be rebuilt.

Homicides: 270 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 329 in 2024, about 11.3 per 100,000 on the city population. HPD's own year-end count, obtained by the Houston Chronicle through an open records request, was 272 against 331 in 2024, a 17% drop; nothing fetched explains the gap of two cases in each year between the two series. The high point in the CDE series since 2021 is 474, 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 3,495,300 nonfarm jobs in the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 44,700 or 1.3% on the year. Construction grew fastest (+5.5%, to 269,000), then professional and business services (+2.6%, to 581,300) and government (+1.9%), with education and health services and leisure and hospitality both up 1.3%, while information (-5.9%), financial activities (-1.2%), mining and logging (-0.5%, to 73,300) and manufacturing (-0.2%, to 240,400) shrank. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 695,600 jobs, unchanged on the year. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48264200000000001) was 3,510,100 in August 2026, 1.2% above August 2025. The Greater Houston Partnership counts 27 Fortune 500 headquarters in the region on the 2026 list, tied with Chicago for second among US metros behind New York and ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth's 24, with a 28th due when Expand Energy moves to Spring; ExxonMobil (No. 9) and Chevron (No. 21) lead them. Port Houston calls the Houston Ship Channel complex the nation's largest port for waterborne tonnage (309.5 million tons in 2023, USACE) and the fifth-ranked US container port by TEUs.

Main sectors: Energy: oil and gas producers, refiners, pipelines and oilfield services (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips, Enterprise Products Partners, Baker Hughes, Halliburton, Cheniere Energy), Trade, transportation and utilities, the metro's largest sector (the Port of Houston, the nation's largest port by waterborne tonnage; Sysco; United Airlines at Bush Intercontinental; CenterPoint Energy, NRG Energy), Professional and business services, including engineering and construction (KBR, Quanta Services, Comfort Systems USA, Waste Management), Health care and life sciences (the Texas Medical Center, Memorial Hermann, Houston Methodist, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas Children's Hospital), Petrochemicals and advanced manufacturing along the Houston Ship Channel (Westlake, NOV).

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 Houston's own rate for tax year 2025 is 51.919 cents per $100 of taxable value, left unchanged by an 11-3 council vote on 15 October 2025 although the city controller warned it would open a $53 million gap in the $7 billion fiscal 2026 budget; the budget committee chair, who voted against, said there was still room under both the state's and the city's own revenue caps. On 10 June 2026 the council passed a $7.5 billion budget for fiscal 2027 by 15 to 1, closing a projected deficit of more than $200 million with no increase in the property tax rate and a new $5 monthly solid waste fee on residential water bills. The rate for tax year 2026 had not been published in anything fetched. The county, school district, METRO 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 Houston's rate was 23.3% (553,576 of 2,370,907), Harris County's 20.8% and the metro's 18.4%. The Texas Medical Center, south of downtown, calls itself the largest medical complex in the world: by its own count 10,000 patient beds, more than 120,000 employees, 10 million patient encounters and 750,000 emergency visits a year, and among its members the world's largest children's hospital and largest cancer hospital (Texas Children's and MD Anderson). Harris Health's Ben Taub Hospital in the medical center, licensed for 402 beds, is the county's public Level I trauma center and treats more than 80,000 emergency patients a year; in May 2024 Harris Health broke ground on a $1.6 billion, 12-story hospital on its Lyndon B. Johnson campus in northeast Houston, due to open in late 2028 as the first Level I trauma center in the county outside the medical center. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Houston ISD, the largest school district in Texas, has been run by a state-appointed board and superintendent, Mike Miles, since the Texas Education Agency took it over in 2023. It counted 168,810 students on its official snapshot of 31 October 2025, down 4.5% from 176,727 a year earlier, and just over 155,600 on 4 September 2026, nearly 10,000 fewer than in September 2025, and it is cutting staff and campus budgets as a result (Houston Chronicle). The Texas Tribune counts 21,000 students lost since the takeover began, a faster decline than any of its urban peers, and about $190 million in state funding with them. Under Miles the number of F-rated campuses fell from 56 to five, but voters rejected a $4.4 billion bond in 2024, the largest Texas school bond ever to fail, and in August 2026 Miles said the official end of the takeover may come at the end of the 2026-27 year. The University of Houston (48,950 students in fall 2025) and Rice University (8,880 in fall 2024) are both inside the city, and Houston Community College renamed itself Houston City College in 2025.

Living there

Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country and the energy capital of its fifth-largest metro, which added 126,720 people in 2024-25, more than any other. It spreads into four counties with 22.7 miles of light rail near the core, and 68.7% of its workers drive alone, though its 3.4% transit share is the highest of the Texas cities this site compares. Water is its hazard: Harvey flooded 154,170 homes in Harris County in 2017, most of them outside the mapped floodplain, and Beryl left more than two million customers without power in July heat in 2024. Summer is long and humid rather than extreme, with far fewer 100F days than Dallas but 111 days a year at 90F or above and 1,317 mm of rain. Texas takes no income tax, 23.3% of the city's residents have no health insurance, and the Texas Medical Center, the largest in the world by its own count, sits a few miles south of downtown. The open questions are fiscal and civic: the council held the property tax rate flat in October 2025 against its controller's warning and passed a fiscal 2027 budget that closes a deficit of more than $200 million without raising it, METRO has shelved the University Line that was once the cornerstone of its expansion plan, and Houston ISD, under state control since 2023, began 2026-27 with nearly 10,000 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.