Understand Highland Beach before you commit to an address

What buying in Highland Beach actually involves

Highland Beach did something unusual in 2024: it left the county fire service and started its own department, the first Palm Beach County municipality to do that in decades. The immediate effect on the tax stack is that it stopped paying the county for fire service and now levies 3.4159 mills of its own plus 0.1716 for debt: close to a wash on paper, and the argument for it was response times rather than money. The total of 15.8455 mills is the third-lowest in this layer, behind Palm Beach and Manalapan.

What that low rate is charged against is the point: a typical home value of about $914,000 makes the actual bill near $13,900 a year. And the insurance here is at the top of the range on this list, shared with the other barrier-island addresses, because a barrier-island address in Palm Beach County is the maximum-exposure case for both windstorm and flood. Most of the housing stock is condominium, which since Florida's 2022 reserve legislation has meant milestone inspections, fully funded structural reserves and, in several buildings on this island, special assessments running to six figures per unit.

There is effectively no commercial development in the town, so every errand is a drive to Boca or Delray along a single coastal road. That is the trade for three miles of quiet barrier island, and it is worth testing in season, when A1A carries the beach traffic of two much larger cities through the middle of the town.

Almost all of the housing is condominium, much of it from the 1970s and 1980s, which puts the milestone inspection and reserve requirements at the center of any purchase. On a barrier island the same buildings also carry the highest windstorm exposure in the county, so the association's insurance program is as important as its reserve study.

Moving to Highland Beach: check these before you commit

• For a condominium: the milestone inspection, the structural integrity reserve study and any assessment already voted. This island has been among the hardest hit by the post-Surfside rules.
• Windstorm and flood insurance quotes before anything else, since a barrier-island address is the most expensive case in the county.
• Whether the unit has hurricane-rated openings throughout, which is now the difference between an insurable building and an uninsurable one.
• The association's insurance program and what the premium has done over three years.
• A1A traffic through the town in season, since it carries far more than the town's own trips.

Highland Beach levies 3.5875 of the 15.8455 mills charged here. The remaining 12.2580 is Palm Beach County, the school district and the countywide special districts, none of which the municipality sets, and none of it is the county Fire/Rescue MSTU, because Highland Beach is outside it.