The short answer
South Florida has 5,812 office buildings of 2,000 SF or more and 12,055 industrial buildings of 5,000 SF or more — a finite pool, which is why a compressed timeline costs money. It is also three genuinely different markets: office sold at a $438 per square foot median in Miami-Dade against $277 in Broward, while industrial stayed within a much tighter $212 to $264 band. Workforce commute, not rent, is usually the variable that decides the county correctly.
What companies get wrong about moving here
The tax arithmetic gets done carefully and the real estate gets done in a hurry. I see it repeatedly.
A company spends nine months modelling the move, picks South Florida, and then gives itself six weeks to find space — usually starting with whatever a landlord's broker showed them on a site visit. That is how firms end up in the wrong submarket paying above-market rent on terms written entirely for the other side.
The second mistake is assuming this is one market. It is three counties with genuinely different economics, and the difference between them is larger than most relocating executives expect.
What exists, by county
| County | Office 2,000+ SF | Industrial 5,000+ SF | Office median $/SF | Industrial median $/SF |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miami-Dade | 2,647 | 6,137 | $438 | $264 |
| Broward | 1,898 | 3,963 | $277 | $212 |
| Palm Beach | 1,267 | 1,955 | $338 | $226 |
Building counts from tri-county property records; sale medians from recorded arms-length transactions 2021 through August 2026 (Broward through 2024).
5,812 office buildings at 2,000 square feet or larger, and 12,055 industrial buildings at 5,000 or larger. That is the real universe, and it is finite — which is why the good space in the right submarket goes quickly and why arriving with six weeks to decide is a disadvantage you hand to the other side.
The county split matters. Miami-Dade office sold at a $438 median against Broward's $277 — a 58% difference for what is nominally the same product an hour apart. Industrial compresses the other way: $264 in Miami-Dade against $212 in Broward and $226 in Palm Beach, a much tighter band. If you are moving a distribution operation the county choice is mostly about drive times; if you are moving a headquarters it is a real budget decision.
Labour and drive time decide this more than rent does
The rent line gets all the attention in a relocation and it is rarely the deciding variable.
Where your people will live and how long they will drive determines whether you can hire and keep staff, and South Florida traffic makes a fifteen-mile difference into a forty-minute one at the wrong hour. A cheaper building in a submarket your workforce will not commute to is not cheaper.
For anyone moving from the Northeast, the other adjustment is that this region has no single centre. New York has a downtown; South Florida has a chain of them — Brickell, downtown Fort Lauderdale, Boca, West Palm — strung along ninety miles of coast. Picking the wrong link in that chain is the most expensive mistake available, and it is invisible on a spreadsheet.
Sequence it properly
Start the real estate at the same time as the entity and tax work, not after it. Twelve months out is comfortable, six is tight, three means taking what is available.
Tour before you commit to a submarket, and tour on a weekday at the hour your staff would actually arrive. Look at more than the buildings that are formally listed — a meaningful share of the space that changes hands here never appears on a portal.
And get the lease reviewed by somebody on your side. Florida commercial leases are landlord-form documents by default and they are not gentle. Personal guaranties, CAM definitions, relocation clauses, and holdover penalties are all negotiable and none of them will be volunteered.
The migration story reversed, and the pitch decks have not caught up
Almost every relocation article still ranking for this topic was written when the trend line pointed one way. It does not any more. Florida's net domestic migration in 2025 was 22,517 people. In 2022 it was 310,892. That is a fall of about 93 percent in three years, and it is the single most important fact that nobody moving a company here seems to have been told.
The county numbers are sharper. For the year to 1 July 2025 the Census Bureau put Miami-Dade's net domestic migration at negative 72,254, the largest outflow the county has on record, and its total population fell by 10,115 to roughly 2.80 million. Broward lost 29,517 residents to domestic migration over the same period but finished the year down only 372 people, because international arrivals covered nearly all of it.
Here is the distinction that a lot of content on this topic gets wrong. Net domestic migration and total net migration are two different measures. Florida's total net migration in 2025, domestic plus international, was 201,191. Both numbers are correct. An article quoting the 201,000 figure as proof that Americans are still pouring in has confused them. An article quoting 22,500 as total growth has confused them the other way.
Corporate demand went in the opposite direction from the population. Brickell office asking rents reached roughly $79.70 a foot in July 2026 against about $72 in Manhattan, which is an odd sentence to write but a checkable one. I worked through what that gap does and does not mean in the piece on Miami office rents against Manhattan wages. In February 2026 Palantir moved its headquarters out of Denver to an Aventura address.
So residents are leaving and companies are still arriving. If your relocation case rests on the idea that everyone is moving to Florida, it is out of date, and someone on your board will eventually find that out. If it rests on customers you already serve down here, or capital that is already based here, it holds up fine.
Florida stopped taxing commercial rent in October 2025
For rental periods beginning on or after 1 October 2025, Florida no longer charges sales tax on commercial rent. HB 7031 removed both the state rate and the local discretionary surtax. It was the only statewide tax of its kind in the country.
The state rate had already been cut to 2 percent, and Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach each added a 1 percent surtax, so most tenants here were paying about 3 percent on top of rent and operating expenses. On a hypothetical 10,000 square foot suite at $40 a foot, that is roughly $12,000 a year that simply no longer exists.
Watch for it in renewal negotiations, where a landlord proposal built on an older template can still carry the old assumption. Full detail sits in the write-up on the commercial rent tax repeal.
The state relocation incentives were repealed in 2023
If you are reading a page that promises Florida relocation incentives, check its date first. HB 5 was signed on 31 May 2023 and took effect on 1 July 2023. It repealed the Qualified Target Industry tax refund and the Quick Action Closing Fund, along with the state's New Markets, entertainment industry, and qualified defense contractor and space flight programs. It also folded Enterprise Florida into what is now the Department of Commerce. Agreements signed before that date were left in place, which is part of why the old program names still circulate.
What survives runs at county and city level, and it is narrower and more conditional than the state programs were. The three places to start are the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance and the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County. Each sets its own thresholds around job counts and wage levels, and each wants to hear from you before you commit to a site, not after.
Let me be plain about my role here. I am a broker. I am not a CPA, a tax attorney or an incentives consultant. Everything above about tax and incentives is on this page so you know which questions to ask and which dates to check. Confirm all of it with your own advisers before any of it goes into a model.
The number a CFO should actually model
The trade South Florida asks you to make is above-national occupancy cost against below-national wages. Both halves are real. The second half is a lot smaller than people expect.
Take the wage side first. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the mean hourly wage across the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro at $32.30 for May 2025, published in July 2026, against a national mean of $33.54. That is a discount of under 4 percent. Two things about that figure matter more than the figure itself. It averages every occupation in the metro, so it tells you nothing about what a controller or a warehouse supervisor actually costs here. And it treats all three counties as one unit, which means it cannot help you choose between them at all.
Now the rent side. In July 2026, average office asking rents ran about $42.80 a foot across the Fort Lauderdale market and about $50.60 in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, against a national average near $33.30. The spread between those two South Florida submarkets is close to $8 a foot. On 15,000 square feet that is roughly $117,000 a year, every year of the term, set by a decision most companies make on instinct in the first fortnight of the search.
That is the whole point. The county decision moves far more money than the wage discount does, and it moves money in a direction you can actually control. When I build this comparison for a company I run total annual occupancy cost across each realistic county option, loaded with operating expenses and parking, over the full term rather than year one. That is most of the work behind office tenant representation, and it usually reorders the shortlist.
What I do for a relocating company
I represent you and only you. I do not list buildings for landlords here, so there is no version of this where I am on both sides.
That means: a real read on which submarket fits your workforce, a search that includes what is not publicly listed, comparables so you know whether an asking rent is defensible, and a negotiation on the terms that matter beyond the rent number — the buildout allowance, the guaranty, the escalations, the out.
Tenant representation is paid by the landlord out of the transaction, so it costs you nothing to have someone in the room whose only job is your side of it.
If you are evaluating a move to Broward, Miami-Dade or Palm Beach, tell me what the operation needs and roughly when. I will give you a straight read on where it belongs and what it should cost.
Want the number on your building?
Search the property for an instant public-record snapshot and the closest recorded sales, or send me the address and I will come back inside one business day with a comp-driven range, what I think it would actually trade at, and what I would fix first.
Related resources.
Frequently asked questions about corporate relocation.
How far ahead should we start looking for space before relocating to South Florida?
Twelve months is comfortable for anything over a few thousand square feet, six months is tight, and three months means choosing from what happens to be available rather than what is right. Start the real estate in parallel with the entity and tax work rather than after it.
Which South Florida county should our company move to?
It depends on your workforce more than your budget. Miami-Dade office sold at a $438 per square foot median against Broward's $277, so the cost difference is real, but the deciding factor is usually where your staff will live and how long they will drive. South Florida has no single centre — it is a chain of business districts along ninety miles of coast, and picking the wrong one is the costly mistake.
How much commercial space is actually available in South Florida?
Across the tri-county there are 5,812 office buildings of 2,000 square feet or more and 12,055 industrial buildings of 5,000 square feet or more. It is a finite pool, and the right space in the right submarket moves quickly, which is why compressed timelines cost money.
Do we need a broker if we already found a building?
It costs you nothing to have one, since tenant representation is paid by the landlord out of the transaction. What you get is someone who knows whether the asking rent is defensible, what else is available including space that never gets listed, and which lease terms are negotiable. The landlord already has representation in the room.
Is industrial or office cheaper here than the Northeast?
That comparison depends on your origin market and the specific submarket, and I would rather give you real numbers for your requirement than a generality. What I can tell you from recorded sales is the internal spread: industrial ran $212 to $264 per square foot across the three counties, while office ranged from $277 in Broward to $438 in Miami-Dade.
Are people still moving to Florida?
Not the way they were. Florida's net domestic migration fell to 22,517 in 2025 from 310,892 in 2022, a drop of roughly 93 percent. Total net migration, which adds international arrivals, was 201,191, so the state still grew. Miami-Dade lost more residents to domestic migration than in any year on record. Corporate arrivals have held up much better than population growth has.
Do I still pay sales tax on commercial rent in Florida?
No. For rental periods starting on or after 1 October 2025, Florida no longer charges sales tax on commercial rent, and the county discretionary surtax went with it. Before the repeal, tenants in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach were paying about 3 percent. Check that any budget or landlord proposal drafted before late 2025 has had that line taken out.
What relocation incentives does Florida offer a company moving here?
Fewer than most articles suggest. HB 5, effective 1 July 2023, repealed the Qualified Target Industry tax refund, the Quick Action Closing Fund and several other programs, and folded Enterprise Florida into the Department of Commerce. What remains is county and city level. Start with the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance or the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County, and talk to them before you commit to a site.
Are South Florida wages low enough to offset the rent?
Usually not by as much as a plan assumes. The metro mean hourly wage was $32.30 in May 2025 against $33.54 nationally, under 4 percent below. That average covers every occupation across all three counties, so it cannot tell you what your specific roles cost or which county to choose. The county decision moves considerably more money than the wage gap does.