Jacksonville vs Hialeah: which should you move to?

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in Jacksonville went from 6,496 in 2021 to 6,141 in 2022 and 6,513 in 2023, then fell to 5,680 in 2024 and 5,231 in 2025, 8% lower than in 2024 and 19% lower than in 2021. Property offenses rose from 23,968 in 2021 to a peak of 26,443 in 2024 and fell 17% in 2025 to 21,920. Motor vehicle theft drove the swing: 2,035 in 2021, 3,461 in 2024 and 2,036 in 2025, down 41% in the last year. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 7% (4,533 to 4,236), robberies down 16% (639 to 539), rapes down 16% (445 to 376), burglaries down 22% and larcenies down 12%, while murders rose from 63 to 80, the one violent measure that went up. The sheriff's office cleared 55% of 2025's murders against 73% of 2024's, as Action News Jax reported from JSO records. The 2025 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: 5,231 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (ORI FL0160000) in calendar 2025, divided by the 1,017,689 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 1,008,920 the rate is 518. The sheriff's office, formed when the city and county police merged in 1968, is responsible for law enforcement in the county; Jacksonville Beach has its own department. That is higher than Miami (359), Tampa (375.5) and Fort Worth (375), close to Boston (507) and below San Antonio (532), Dallas (577) and Houston (890).

Homicides: 80 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 63 in 2024, about 7.9 per 100,000 on the city population. The sheriff's office's own counts differ slightly by date and definition: Action News Jax, reading JSO records, reported 76 murders in 2025 against 63 in 2024, and News4JAX reported 79 murder cases in 2025 within more than 100 homicides of all kinds, including 11 fatal police shootings. The 2024 figure was the low point: News4JAX's count of 82 homicides of all kinds that year was the lowest in the 19 years it has kept one. The CDE series is 107 in 2021, 132 in 2022, 128 in 2023, 63 in 2024 and 80 in 2025.

Down for violent crime, and down for property crime by less than the FBI's totals suggest. On the FBI CDE's counts violent offenses went from 474 in 2022 to 431 in 2023, 415 in 2024 and 412 in 2025, about 210, 187, 178 and 178 per 100,000 on each year's Vintage 2025 population, and January to July 2026 brought 192 against 246 in the same months of 2025, a fall of 22%, mostly in aggravated assaults (165 against 214). Robberies halved, from 66 in 2022 to 31 in 2025. The CDE's property totals fell from 4,329 in 2022 to 3,273 in 2025, but about 500 of that fall is motor vehicle thefts the FBI's series stopped carrying in October 2023; without them property offenses went from 3,801 in 2022 to 3,621 in 2023, 3,610 in 2024 and 3,266 in 2025, a fall of 14% over three years, with larceny down from 3,565 to 3,018. FDLE's file, which kept counting car thefts, has them falling too, from 541 in 2022 and 566 in 2023 to 488 in 2024 and 337 in 2025. January to July 2026 property offenses (1,969) were level with 2025 (1,962). The CDE counts were read on 2 October 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September 2026, whose August 2026 property count (139, about half a normal month) and September figures (none) are incomplete and are not used.

What the rates cover: Computed: 412 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Hialeah Police Department (ORI FL0130400) in calendar 2025, divided by the 230,968 Vintage 2025 estimate for July 2025; on the CDE's own agency population of 238,769 the rate is 173. The department has reported to the FBI through the incident-based system since January 2021 and the CDE has every month from then to August 2026. 2025 is the year the Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Port St. Lucie and St. Petersburg profiles use. That is half Miami's 359, below Tampa's 376, St. Petersburg's 502 and Jacksonville's 514, and above Port St. Lucie's 130 and Cape Coral's 122 for 2023. Aggravated assault is 356 of the 412. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement's incident-based (FIBRS) file, which feeds the FBI and counts somewhat more broadly (its forcible sex offenses include fondling), has 432 violent offenses for the department in 2025, about 187 per 100,000.

Homicides: 3 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, about 1.3 per 100,000 on the city population; FDLE's file also has 3. The CDE series is 12 in 2021, 6 in 2022, 6 in 2023, 2 in 2024, 3 in 2025 and 2 in January to August 2026. Miami had 26 in 2025, Tampa 17, St. Petersburg 9 and Port St. Lucie 4.

BLS counted 803,800 nonfarm jobs in the Jacksonville MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up only 500 on the year, almost flat. Private education and health services grew fastest (+3.3%, to 139,800) and professional and business services next (+2.0%, to 120,100), while financial activities lost 4,400 jobs (-6.1%, to 67,800), finance and insurance alone 3,000, and information fell 8.2% to 13,400. Government shrank 2.5% to 77,900, almost all of it federal (-8.4%, from 20,300 to 18,600); BLS's payroll count does not include active-duty sailors. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 170,000 jobs, and leisure and hospitality held at 93,900. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS12272600000000001) was 806,600 in August 2026, 0.4% above August 2025. JAXPORT moved 1,388,841 TEUs of containers in fiscal 2025 (October 2024 to September 2025), up 4% on the year, 506,237 vehicles and 10.2 million tons of cargo, and says its cargo supports more than 258,800 jobs and $44 billion of annual economic impact in the region and state; a $250 million modernization of Blount Island's container and auto terminals was completed in 2025. The state's 2024 defense summary, on 2022 figures, puts defense spending in Duval County at $6.5 billion and its total impact at $9.1 billion, 68,060 jobs and 10.4% of the county's economy.

Main sectors: Port, rail and logistics: JAXPORT, Florida's No. 1 container port by volume (nearly 1.39 million TEUs and 506,237 vehicles in fiscal 2025), CSX and the Florida East Coast Railway, both headquartered in the city, and the shipping lines to Puerto Rico (Crowley, TOTE Maritime, Trailer Bridge), The Navy: Naval Air Station Jacksonville, the largest installation in Navy Region Southeast, Naval Station Mayport, home of the Fourth Fleet and 21 ships, and Marine Corps Support Facility Blount Island; defense spending has a $9.1 billion total economic impact in Duval County, Finance, insurance and financial technology (FIS and Fidelity National Financial, both headquartered in the city, Florida Blue, and Deutsche Bank's second-largest US operation), a sector now shrinking, Health care (Mayo Clinic Florida, Baptist Health and Wolfson Children's Hospital, UF Health Jacksonville, St. Vincent's), the metro's fastest-growing large sector, Trade, transportation and utilities, the metro's largest sector by payroll jobs (170,000 in August 2026).

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). On 22 September 2026 the City Council adopted a $2 billion budget for fiscal 2027, 18 to 1, and kept the consolidated government's rate at 11.1919 mills, about $11.19 per $1,000 of taxable value, on a 16 to 3 vote; The four towns that kept their own governments pay a different city rate (7.9012 mills at the Beaches, 9.4208 in Baldwin). Council and mayor held the rate rather than cut it because of Amendment 3, the homestead property tax cut on Florida's 3 November 2026 ballot, which the city expects would open a revenue shortfall of about $300 million by 2028 if it passes, and tied some spending to its outcome (Jacksonville Today). School board and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

BLS counted 1,349,400 nonfarm jobs in the Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall metropolitan division, which is Miami-Dade County, in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 6,200 or 0.5% on the year. Professional and business services (+5,300, or 2.5%, to 221,300), private education and health services (+4,600, or 2.0%, to 229,600), leisure and hospitality (+2,900, or 1.9%, to 153,400) and wholesale trade (+1,500, or 1.8%, to 82,800) added the most, while financial activities lost 5,100 (-5.0%, to 96,700), government 1,100 and transportation, warehousing and utilities 1,000. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest supersector at 324,900, 24% of the county's jobs. The City's 2025 financial report lists its ten principal employers, led by Palmetto General Hospital (1,635), the City (1,492), UPS (1,119) and Hialeah Hospital (1,032), at 8,995 jobs, 7.8% of employment in the city on the City's count; six of the ten carry exactly the headcount they had in 2016, so the list has not been recounted for most of them. Most residents work elsewhere in the county: 61.8% of the city's workers (74,100 of 119,984) worked outside Hialeah in 2024, but only 9.8% (11,754) outside Miami-Dade. 13.2% worked from home, and the mean commute for the rest was 30 minutes, with 11.4% spending an hour or more (ACS 2024 1-year, B08007, B08008, B08013, B08101 and B08303).

Main sectors: Health care: Palmetto General Hospital (1,635 staff) is the city's largest employer, and Hialeah Hospital (1,032), Larkin Community Hospital's Palm Springs campus (683) and La Colonia Medical Centers (527) are also among its ten largest, in a county sector (private education and health services, 229,600 jobs) that added 4,600 jobs over the year, Shipping, wholesale and warehousing: United Parcel Service (1,119) is the third-largest employer, in a city beside Miami International Airport; Miami-Dade's wholesale trade employs 82,800 and its transportation, warehousing and utilities 98,400, Groceries and retail: Publix (771), Fresco y Más (741) and Sedano's (545) among the ten largest employers, the many independent shops and supermarkets on the main streets that Wikipedia describes, and Westland Mall, in a county with 143,700 retail jobs, City government: the City of Hialeah (1,492, down from 1,755 in 2016), which runs its own police, fire department, library and free bus service, Light industry: the garment and manufacturing plants that made Hialeah an industrial city in the 1970s and 1980s have mostly gone, replaced in part by electronics and technology businesses (Wikipedia); Miami-Dade's manufacturing employs 46,800, 3.5% of its 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 and brings the Save Our Homes limit on how fast its assessment can rise (Florida Department of Revenue). A property in the City of Hialeah (Miami-Dade millage code 0400) paid 18.6468 mills for 2025 on the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser's adopted chart, down from 18.6638 in 2024: the City's own 6.3018 plus the 12.3450 of school, county and regional levies every municipality in the county pays. Hialeah runs its own fire department and its own library, so it pays neither the county Fire Rescue district's 2.3965 mills nor the library district's 0.2812. The City has held its rate at 6.3018 for at least ten years while taxable value rose 11.0% in fiscal 2025 to $22.2 billion (City of Hialeah financial report), and the appraiser's proposed 2026 table keeps it there, for a total of 18.6134. Miami-Dade is also the one Florida county with its own deed tax: 60 cents per $100 rather than the statewide 70, plus a 45-cent surtax that is not due on a transfer of a single-family dwelling only (Florida Department of Revenue), so a house at Hialeah's typical value of $445,331 carries about $2,672 and a condominium or duplex at the same price about $4,676, the seller's by convention. Zillow's typical home value for the city was $445,331 in June 2026, down 1.5% on the year, and its observed rent $2,374; the bills, insurance and flood exposure that follow belong to the housing layer.

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; an organizing committee relaunched a ballot initiative to expand it in February 2026 (KFF). Florida's uninsured rate was 10.9% in 2024 (2,509,782 of 23,038,464), the sixth-highest of any state, against 8.2% nationally, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates; the City of Jacksonville's was 10.1% (99,720 of 990,245), Duval County's 9.9% and the metro's 8.2%. UF Health Jacksonville, the University of Florida's academic hospital downtown with 695 beds and another 216 at UF Health North, is home to North Florida's Level I trauma center and carries the city's safety-net care: the fiscal 2027 city budget carries $56 million for its indigent care (Jacksonville Today). Mayo Clinic's Florida campus on the Southside, Mayo's first outside Rochester, opened in 1986 and has a hospital Wikipedia gives 304 beds, with an expansion to 428 announced for 2026. Baptist Health runs Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville and, beside it on the downtown riverfront, the 281-bed Wolfson Children's Hospital, the region's only Level I pediatric trauma center verified by the American College of Surgeons. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Duval County Public Schools, whose boundaries match the county's, has fallen below 100,000 students this fall for the first time in modern history, a 16% decline since 2015, when it had more than 115,000, as charter schools, homeschooling and state scholarships for private tuition grew (Action News Jax, 30 September 2026). It cut 115 teaching positions in September 2025 after a 1.9% drop in enrollment, closed several elementary schools that summer under its 2024 master facilities plan, and is consolidating four more in 2026-27, with two others delayed to 2027-28 and 2028-29. The University of North Florida, a public R2 research university founded in 1965 on the Southside, enrolled 16,575 students in 2024 (Florida Board of Governors). Jacksonville University, private, in Arlington, enrolled 4,247 in fall 2024 and has what Wikipedia calls the second-largest Naval ROTC program in the country. Florida State College at Jacksonville, the state college with campuses across the city, enrolled 23,556 students in 2024-25 (IPEDS, as compiled by UnivStats), 70% of them part time. Edward Waters University, founded in 1866, is the state's oldest historically Black college, and the city has committed $130 million to a new University of Florida graduate campus (Jacksonville Today).

Living there

Jacksonville is the largest city by land area in the contiguous United States, 747 square miles, because in 1968 it consolidated with Duval County and took in almost all of it; it is Florida's largest city by a wide margin and the eleventh-largest in the country, yet its metro is the smallest of the four Florida metros this site compares, and half the metro's growth since 2020 has been in St. Johns and Nassau counties rather than the city. The St. Johns River runs north through the middle of it to the Atlantic, and the river is both the economy and the risk: JAXPORT, Florida's busiest container port, and the Navy's bases at NAS Jacksonville and Mayport line it, and Irma in 2017 pushed it to its highest recorded level downtown. It is the coolest of the Florida cities here after Tallahassee, with real if brief winters, and hurricanes rarely hit it directly. It is built for the car: 70.9% of workers drive alone and 0.8% take transit, and the transit agency is cutting service, halting the Skyway and ending its autonomous shuttle in a budget crisis. Violent crime, at 514 per 100,000 on the FBI's counts, is higher than in Miami or Tampa. Household income, at $72,389, sits in the middle of the Florida cities, and Florida takes no income tax. The open questions are the transit agency's finances, a shrinking school district, the November 2026 homestead tax vote the city has budgeted against, and whether finance jobs, down 6.1% in a year, keep leaving.

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). The City of Hialeah's uninsured rate was 15.1% in 2024 (35,490 of 234,398, ACS 2024 1-year), above Miami-Dade's 12.4%, Florida's 10.9% and the national 8.2%. The city has two acute care hospitals, Hialeah Hospital and Palmetto General Hospital, which Steward Health Care bought from Tenet in August 2021 and lost in its bankruptcy: a court approved their sale to Healthcare Systems of America on 25 October 2024, and Hialeah Hospital is now owned by Medical Properties Trust and operated by that company (Wikipedia). Palmetto General is the city's largest employer (1,635 staff) and Hialeah Hospital its fourth (1,032), with Larkin Community Hospital's Palm Springs campus (683) and La Colonia Medical Centers (527) also among the ten largest (City of Hialeah). Wikipedia gives Hialeah Hospital 378 beds from the hospital's own site of 2015; this file did not verify a current bed count for either hospital, or a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Miami-Dade County Public Schools runs the city's public schools. The district counted 18,910 fewer students on the first days of 2026-27 than at the end of 2025-26, a first-day snapshot it says the October count will refine, with private school vouchers, the cost of living and immigration enforcement among the reasons given; it had already closed or consolidated nine schools, and the 27 more it has put under review or reassessment do not include any named in Hialeah (WLRN; CBS News Miami). Wikipedia's list of the schools serving the city includes Hialeah Senior High, Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High and Westland Hialeah Senior High, with the José Martí MAST 6-12 magnet academy and the City of Hialeah Educational Academy, a charter school (Wikipedia). Miami Dade College has had a Hialeah campus since 1980. The City runs its own public library system, founded in 1924, a year before the city was incorporated, and outside the county's library district, which is why the county library levy does not appear on Hialeah tax bills (Wikipedia; Miami-Dade Property Appraiser).

Living there

Hialeah is the most Cuban city in the United States. It was laid out in 1921 by the aviator Glenn Curtiss and the cattleman James Bright on a prairie between Biscayne Bay and the Everglades, incorporated in 1925, the year Hialeah Park's racetrack opened, and became a working-class city after 1959 as successive waves of Cuban exiles settled there (Wikipedia). On the ACS 2024 1-year estimates 95.3% of its people are Hispanic, 72.7% are of Cuban origin and 77.1% were born outside the United States, against 55.3% for Miami-Dade; 91.9% speak Spanish at home and 59.5% speak English less than very well (2020-2024 5-year). It is dense, about 10,700 people per square mile of land, and one of the few places in the county with a street grid numbered separately from Miami's. It has the second-lowest household income of the Florida cities this site compares ($57,151, above only Tallahassee's) and, after Miami and Orlando, the lowest share of owners (42.8%), but its unemployment is low (2.3% in July 2026) and most of its workers have jobs inside Miami-Dade. It is also older than its reputation, with a median age of 46.0. It barely grew from 2020 to 2025 (3.5%) and lost people in the last year, as Miami-Dade did. Violent crime in 2025 was 178 per 100,000, half Miami's, with three homicides. Its own government does more than most: it runs its fire department, its library and free buses, and its property tax rate has not moved from 6.3018 mills in a decade.