Orlando vs El Paso: which should you move to?

Orlando PD reports overall crime down 18% in 2024 and another 19% in 2025, violent crime down 10% in 2024 and 9% in 2025, and shootings with victims down 41% from 2023 to 2025. Homicides fell from 31 in 2023 to 10 in 2025. The FBI's public feed has no usable Orlando data after 2022, so these are the department's own figures.

What the rates cover: FBI Crime Data Explorer, Orlando Police Department (ORI FL0480400), 2022: 2,597 violent offenses, 835.8 per 100k. 2022 is the last year with twelve complete months in the FBI feed; 2023 through 2025 show zeros for this agency, so no FBI rate exists for those years. Orlando PD's own count of violent crime incidents (a broader in-house definition) was 6,754 in 2023 and 5,928 in 2025, which would be about 1,775 per 100k on the 2025 population.

Homicides: Orlando Police Department: 10 homicides in 2025, the lowest since 1971, down from 23 in 2024 and 31 in 2023 (OPD's 2023 figure was reported as 38 in a January 2025 release and 31 in the February 2026 release). About 3.0 per 100k on the 2025 city population. FBI CDE 2022: 32 homicides, 10.3 per 100k.

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.

Leisure and hospitality employed 305,500 of 1,506,600 nonfarm jobs in the MSA in June 2026 (BLS CES, not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), about 20%, roughly double the national share, and those jobs pay below the private-sector average, which is why household income trails the US median despite fast job growth. Disney is the largest employer at about 77,000 in the region; AdventHealth employs about 37,700 and Lockheed Martin more than 14,000.

Main sectors: Tourism and hospitality (Disney, Universal, convention centre), Health care (AdventHealth, Orlando Health), Aerospace, defence and simulation (Lockheed Martin, Central Florida Research Park), Construction and real estate, Professional and business services.

No state or city income tax. Property tax runs around 1% of assessed value with a homestead exemption and the Save Our Homes 3% cap for owner-occupiers; not verified here.

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.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid; Florida did not expand Medicaid under the ACA, so a larger share of working adults is uninsured than in most states, and hospitality jobs often come with thin coverage. Two large non-profit systems dominate: AdventHealth Orlando (one of the biggest hospitals in the country) and Orlando Health with Orlando Regional Medical Center, the region's Level I trauma centre, plus Nemours Children's Hospital at Lake Nona and the UCF Lake Nona Hospital.

Education

The University of Central Florida enrols about 70,000 students, among the largest campuses in the US, and anchors the Central Florida Research Park; Rollins College in Winter Park and Valencia College (a two-year college with a national Aspen Prize) are the other main institutions. Orange County Public Schools is the eighth largest district in the US with roughly 200,000 students, and Florida's universal school-choice vouchers, charter schools and magnet programmes mean many families do not attend their zoned school.

Living there

Orlando is a sprawling, car-first region of master-planned subdivisions, toll roads and strip centres, with a small walkable core around Lake Eola, Thornton Park, Mills 50 and College Park, and the theme parks 15 miles southwest in a separate world of their own. Summers are long, humid and stormy, winters mild, and the population skews young and Latino, with the largest Puerto Rican community in Florida. Housing and insurance costs have risen faster than the tourism-weighted wages, and hurricane season shapes the calendar every year.

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.