Fort Lauderdale, the city that anchors Broward County, may not have been flying so far beneath the radar after all.
Roughly a week after Visit Lauderdale, the county’s tourism marketing agency, spent big money to participate in CNN’s live New Year’s Eve countdown to gain more visibility for the region, U-Haul, the worldwide self-moving firm, ranked the City of Fort Lauderdale No. 7 among growth cities nationally based on one-way residential moves. Ocala led a list of eight Florida cities in the Top Ten for 2025.
U-Haul ranked Florida as the No. 2 growth state for 2025, second only to Texas, according to its proprietary growth index that analyzed one-way customer moves from the past calendar year.
The company said Florida climbed two spots from No. 4 in 2024. It was ranked No. 2 from 2021-23 and was the leading growth state in 2019. The year 2025 marked “11 consecutive years that Florida has been among the top four U-Haul growth states,” the company said in a statement.
“U-Haul customers arriving in Florida accounted for 50.6% of all one-way traffic in and out of the state last year [49.4% leaving],” the company said.
“Florida has opportunities for work, no state taxes, and great weather year-round,” said Mario Martinez, U-Haul area district vice president for South Florida. “It’s also a great place to start and raise a family. You have all types of activities across the state, and good schools from preschool to universities.”
“We see a lot of people moving here from the Northeast,” he added. “We have an endless number of retirees coming to Florida. They come for a better quality of life, warm weather and a laid-back lifestyle. It’s a melting pot of people here.”
Florida’s “notable growth markets” (listed in alphabetical order) include Bradenton, Brandon, Clermont, Davenport, Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Haines City, Kissimmee, Lady Lake, Lakeland, Leesburg, Melbourne, North Fort Myers, North Miami Beach, North Port, Ocala, Palm Bay, Panama City, Port Charlotte, Port St. Lucie, Sarasota, St. Augustine, St. Cloud, Wildwood and Winter Haven.
U-Haul said Texas was the No. 1 growth state in the nation with North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina completing the top five for 2025.
California ranked 50th for the sixth straight year, U-Haul said, “with the largest net loss of one-way U-Haul customers.”
Fort Lauderdale DDA and Sublime Imagery/Courtesy
In the midst of a continuing migration surge to Florida, Fort Lauderdale was ranked No. 7 for inbound growth in 2025 by the U-Haul self-moving giant. (Fort Lauderdale DDA and Sublime Imagery/Courtesy)
More people, more business
From law firms to banks to real estate firms, the continuous surge of out-of-state residents into South Florida is paying business dividends.
John Fumero, managing shareholder of the Fort Lauderdale office of Nason Yeager, said his law firm is adding office space in the city’s downtown. The firm, which opened for business in 1960 in Palm Beach Gardens, is also growing in Boca Raton.
“It’s undeniable in just the last few years that South Florida has exploded in terms of business growth,” he said. “You read in the papers almost every day major financial players, hedge fund managers, chairmen and CEOs of companies and corporations — they’re all moving to Southeast Florida.”
Born and educated in South Florida, Fumero, a Hollywood resident, said the firm has witnessed a substantial increase in business in all three counties.
“My firm handles everything from SEC law to real estate to land development work,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons we opened a Fort Lauderdale office. Like some other businesses, we’re in the talent business. It’s important to be in a position to attract and retain legal talent — the best of the best. Young people graduating from law school today want to be in these areas. Fort Lauderdale is one of those areas.”
Florida is also a place where investors in sizable numbers are buying residential properties and leasing them to others. For that type of activity, Turbo Tenant of Denver, a property management software company, helps landlords handle their holdings.
Harrison Stevens, vice president of marketing and former Florida resident, said the firm is seeing customer accounts grow significantly in a variety of places like Tampa and Jacksonville, although Miami and Fort Lauderdale were flat year-over-year between 2024 and 2025.
“Because the rents are higher in South Florida, it gives people a lot of opportunities to invest and rent out and still be cash-flow positive,” he said. “It’s always been a good investment area. There is a lot of outside influential money coming from other parts of the country.”
Lofty housing prices — not a deterrent?
Bryan Cutsinger, an economist who arrived in South Florida from Colorado 18 months ago to teach at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, said new arrivals coming from California and New York City still see an advantage in migrating to Florida because they are paying less for housing here.
“Obviously real estate prices here are quite high,” he said. “They’re also really high in California and New York, too.
“If you are coming from San Francisco, prices are not a shell shock. We’ve got the fourth lowest property taxes in the country. And we’ve got relatively low sales taxes.”
Carline Jean
One West Palm, featuring two 30-story, 426-foot towers, is coming to West Palm Beach and will be the city’s tallest buildings, signaling a trend of growth and migration to the area. (Carline Jean / South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
“The Florida proposition looks a lot more attractive to them than it does to us,” Cutsinger added. “We’re already getting the advantage of no income taxes and low sales taxes.”
He noted that South Florida’s jobless and inflation numbers remain below national averages, with the U.S. jobless rate at 4.4% in September and the tri-county rates running from 3% to just below the national number. The annual inflation in December was 2.58% for Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area, below the U.S. rate of 2.65%
“If you look relative to the country, overall this still seems to be a pretty popular place,” Cutsinger said.
David Druey, Florida president of Arkansas-based Centennial Bank, said the pace of loans for small businesses and mortgages for homebuyers has been brisk.
“When we are looking at growth markets like Lakeland and New Port Richey, those small business loans are thriving because they are in the service side of business” such as restaurants and hair salons, Druey said.
“We’re right now seeing more increases on the mortgage side,” he said. “We usually use that as a tool to get in new clients.”
In Fort Lauderdale, he said, there was a surplus of apartments “in the last year or so,” but “most units are 90% [occupied] or better.”
“I think there’s a better value in properties in Broward County,” he added. “It’s more economical to live in Broward than West Palm Beach.”
Home sales velocity, meanwhile, is on the rise, according to Miami Realtors, which serves 60,000 industry professionals in the region.
“Housing sales have been rising in South Florida and that is since July,” said Gay Cororaton, the group’s chief economist.
“Taxes have always played a role” in migration, she added.
State legislatures in both California and New York are ramping up new taxes for billionaires and millionaires, which would further widen differentials between those states and Florida.
Cororaton echoed the housing affordability theme voiced by Cutsinger.
“For out-of-state people coming here, homes are more affordable because they are coming from a place where they had to pay over a million, and here the median price is $600,000 to $650,000,” she said. “That is the attractiveness of this area.”
Lofty mortgage rates are also finally declining, setting the stage for a sales uptick this year. “We are already seeing that decrease in inventory,” she said.
Easing to pre-pandemic pace likely
But the pace of Florida’s economic growth may not be sustained over the long term, observers suggest.
Florida TaxWatch, the nonprofit research group that monitors the state’s economy, said in a recent report that “overall, Florida’s economy is now set to return to pre-pandemic growth rates over the next five years, after experiencing high economic growth in the past three years,” according to President and CEO Jeff Kottkamp.
“Fueled by a strong global presence in tourism, trade, and real estate development, Florida’s economy has grown to $1.76 trillion in the first quarter of 2025,” he said. “Moreover, Florida’s economic growth, expressed as real GDP, will continue to grow through 2030, albeit at a reduced rate.”
The report said Florida’s population “is projected to increase by about 2.4 million people [from 23.5 million to 25.9 million] from 2025 to 2034.
“Although the state’s overall population is projected to continue to increase, the number of new people moving to Florida [after subtracting those moving out of Florida] each day is projected to decrease from 922 in 2025 to 702 in 2034,” the report said. “As Florida’s net migration decreases from 922 new residents each day to 895 over the next year [a negative 2.9% growth rate], the population will continue to increase, but at a decreasing rate.”
A home is shown for sale in Fort Lauderdale. Inventories have started to decrease since last July as interest rates have started to ease, according to Miami Realtors. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel file)
The report also notes that “an increasing number of Floridians are leaving the state, often citing increased costs of living, rising property taxes, rising property and automobile insurance, rising housing costs, and more frequent and severe weather events as reasons for leaving.”
The top destination states for those leaving Florida, the report adds, are those with no personal income tax such as Tennessee and Texas, or those with a lower cost of living than Florida, such as Georgia and North Carolina.
Still, Druey, the Centennial banker, believes positive migration will be a continuum in South Florida, particularly if liberal political figures hold sway in New York and other Northeast states.
“I have rose-colored glasses when it comes to South Florida,” he said.
“I would say if we continue to see elections going the way they’ve been going in the Northeast and the civil unrest, I think there is not going to be a shortage of people moving to Florida,” he said.