San Antonio vs Cape Coral: which should you move to?

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in San Antonio went from 11,219 in 2021 to a peak of 13,105 in 2022, then 10,440 in 2023, 9,173 in 2024 and 8,241 in 2025, a 10% drop in the last year and 37% below the peak, and property offenses from 61,559 to 74,787 and a peak of 80,789 in 2023, then 70,657 and 60,693, 25% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft drove most of that swing: 8,912 in 2021, 19,090 in 2023 and 9,527 in 2025, half the peak. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 9% (6,037 to 5,506), robberies down 17% (1,656 to 1,380), rapes down 8% (1,354 to 1,249) and murders down 16% (126 to 106). SAPD's own January-to-November comparison points the same way: all reported crime down 13% (143,529 to 124,314), crimes against property down 18.1%, motor vehicle theft down 26.5% and robberies down 16.4%, while crimes against society rose 15.4%, which the chief put down to more drug arrests. A University of Texas at San Antonio evaluation of the city's Violent Crime Reduction Plan found violent street crime fell 22% in treated hot spots in 2024 against 9.6% citywide (San Antonio Report). 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: 8,241 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the San Antonio Police Department (ORI TXSPD0000) in calendar 2025, divided by the 1,548,422 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 1,549,306 the rate is also 532. No SAPD total on this definition was found in anything fetched. Its year-end report to the City Council's Public Safety Committee in December 2025 counted NIBRS crimes against persons, which include simple assaults, and put them at 28,361 for January through November 2025, down 9% from 31,179 in the same months of 2024 (KSAT).

Homicides: 106 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 126 in 2024, about 6.8 per 100,000 on the city population. SAPD's own count for January through November 2025 was 99 against 119 in the same months of 2024, a drop of nearly 17% (KSAT); a full-year SAPD figure was not found in anything fetched. The high point in the CDE series since 2021 is 233, in 2022, a year whose count includes the 53 migrants found dead in a tractor-trailer on the Southwest Side (San Antonio Report).

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 1,191,700 nonfarm jobs in the San Antonio-New Braunfels MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 6,100 or 0.5% on the year. Professional and business services grew fastest (+4.8%, to 162,400), then construction (+2.9%) and trade, transportation and utilities (+2.8%), while information (-7.7%), government (-3.1%, to 181,800) and private education and health services (-2.0%, to 180,300) shrank; federal government employment fell 6.7%, from 38,700 to 36,100. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 216,300 jobs. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48417000000000001) was 1,195,900 in August 2026, 0.8% above August 2025. BLS's federal line is far smaller than the base itself: the Texas Comptroller counts 74,713 direct employees at Joint Base San Antonio in 2025, 33,256 of them active-duty military, and estimates the base supported 223,349 Texas jobs and $33.9 billion of the state's GDP ($53.5 billion of output). Greater SATX, the regional economic development group, calls it the largest joint base in the US military. UT San Antonio, formed when UTSA and UT Health San Antonio merged in September 2025, calls health care and biosciences, a $44.1 billion sector, the city's largest industry. H-E-B, USAA, Valero Energy and iHeartMedia are all headquartered in the city.

Main sectors: Military and federal installations: Joint Base San Antonio (Fort Sam Houston with Brooke Army Medical Center, Lackland Air Force Base with the Air Force's basic military training and the 16th Air Force, and Randolph Air Force Base with the Air Education and Training Command), Health care and biosciences (the South Texas Medical Center, University Health, UT Health San Antonio and UT San Antonio, Methodist Hospital, the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital), Tourism and hospitality (Visit San Antonio counts $23.4 billion of economic impact and more than 150,000 jobs in 2024), Trade, transportation and utilities, the metro's largest sector by payroll jobs (H-E-B, headquartered in the city; CPS Energy; San Antonio International Airport's cargo), Financial services, energy and media headquarters (USAA, Valero Energy, iHeartMedia).

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 17 September 2026 the City Council voted 7 to 4, with Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones in the minority, to raise the city's own rate for the first time since 1992, as part of a plan to close a $158 million deficit over two years that also includes cuts, fee increases and a second rate increase planned for fiscal 2028. The fiscal 2027 rate is 56.288 cents per $100 of taxable value: 35.138 cents for maintenance and operations, two cents more than before, and 21.150 cents for debt service. The two outlets that gave a figure for the average homestead disagree: KSAT put it at about $49 more a year on a taxable value of $231,356, and the San Antonio Report at $35.43 on a $234,000 home. Senior and disabled homeowners with a tax freeze, about 47% of the city's homesteads, are unaffected (KSAT). The county, school district, University Health, San Antonio River Authority, Alamo Colleges 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, 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 San Antonio's rate was 18.0% (268,665 of 1,496,335), Bexar County's 15.8% and the metro's 14.5%. The South Texas Medical Center on the Northwest Side covers more than 900 acres around the medical school that opened there in 1968 and holds the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Medical Center and a dozen other hospitals; a UTSA study cited by the San Antonio Report in 2022 put its annual economic effect on the region at $24.5 billion. University Health, the Bexar County Hospital District, runs University Hospital there, a 716-bed teaching hospital and a Level I trauma center for adults and children, and the 300-bed Women's & Children's Hospital that opened on the same campus in 2023; it plans to open two community hospitals elsewhere in the county in 2027. Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston has about 8,500 staff. UT Health San Antonio, the clinical arm of UT San Antonio, counts more than 2.5 million patient visits a year. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

No single school district covers the city. Northside ISD, the largest in the San Antonio area with about 98,000 students, faced a $35 million deficit in March 2026, down from nearly $108 million, and its superintendent said closures were possible but not expected for 2026-27 (KSAT). North East ISD lost about 2,000 students in 2025-26, now serves about 55,000, closed three campuses the year before and will accept students from anywhere in the region from 2026-27 (San Antonio Report). San Antonio ISD has closed 25 schools in the last decade and in March 2026 voted to close Rhodes Middle School and hand three other campuses to a charter operator, Third Future Schools, citing falling enrollment and state accountability ratings. Districts say they cannot yet tell how many students the state's new education savings accounts, which help pay private school tuition from 2026-27, will draw away. UT San Antonio, formed on 2 September 2025 when UTSA merged with UT Health San Antonio, has about 40,000 students and 17,000 employees and calls itself the third-largest public research university in Texas by research spending, and the Alamo Colleges District runs five community colleges.

Living there

San Antonio is the second city of Texas and the seventh-largest in the country, and unlike Dallas it is still growing inside its own limits: it added 14,359 residents in 2024-25, the third-largest gain of any US city, and 8.0% since 2020. The military has shaped it for three centuries, and Joint Base San Antonio, with 74,713 direct employees, sits beside the South Texas Medical Center and a tourism trade Visit San Antonio values at $23.4 billion as the pillars of the economy. Household income is lower than in Dallas or Austin, and 18.0% of residents have no health insurance. VIA runs buses only, 2.4% of workers take them and 68.2% drive alone, and the Green Line along San Pedro Avenue, the city's first rapid transit line, is due in April 2028. Summers are long and dry rather than humid, with 122 days a year at 90F or above and 75 at 100F in 2023, and water is the killer: the creeks rise within minutes, and a single night of rain on 12 June 2025 drowned 13 people. The open questions are fiscal and civic: the council raised the city's property tax rate for the first time since 1992 on a 7 to 4 vote the mayor opposed, with a second increase planned, and the big school districts are shrinking, closing campuses and competing for each other's students as the state's education savings accounts begin.

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.