The study compared every state by 51 “livability” factors, including housing costs, healthcare, amenities, income growth and education rate.
Coming in at number six out of 50 overall, Florida also ranked 24th in “homeownership,” third in “income growth,” 29th in “average weekly work hours,” and 27th in “percentage of adults in fair or poor health.” Plus, the Sunshine State grabbed a No. 1 spot for quantity of places to eat.
The state also, however, nabbed the spot for the fourth-highest housing costs in the United States, right under California, Hawaii and Nevada.
In Orlando, while tourism continued to boom in the past year with more than 75 million visitors in 2024 — a promising statistic for locals who work in the industry — the city remains costly to live in.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition in July released a new report detailing how much renters need to make in the U.S. in order to comfortably afford a place to live — and in Orlando, affordability isn’t getting any better.
Although rents aren’t spiking as quickly as they were a few years ago, renters in the Orlando metro still need to make at least $33 an hour to afford the average one-bedroom apartment, or roughly $69,000 per year, according to the housing nonprofit’s new report, titled “Out of Reach.”
The coalition’s report finds that a minimum-wage worker in Florida — earning the state’s minimum wage of $13 an hour — would need to work 96 hours a week to afford a “modest” one-bedroom rental at fair market rate.
And in the housing arena, data pulled earlier this year from a count of homeless people throughout Central Florida showed more than 40 percent of those found living without stable housing in the region are children under 18 and adults 55 and up.
Reporter McKenna Schueler contributed to this report.
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This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.