No, Miami isn’t more expensive than New York. But it may be less ‘affordable’

The thing is, “expensive” is all relative. A locale’s cost of living isn’t a measure of raw prices—it’s prices weighted against what local residents earn. The BEA finding doesn’t mean that an apartment in Miami costs more than a comparable one in Manhattan. In fact, Manhattan’s median listing price per square foot was $1,489 in May 2026, more than three times Miami-Dade County’s $465, according to data retrieved via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. What’s changed is that Miami’s prices have climbed further, relative to what the average Miami resident earns, compared to how New York’s prices have climbed relative to what New Yorkers earn. And truth be told, both cities are viciously expensive.

That distinction also explains why the comparison misses how people actually live in each city. Cost-of-living indexes fold in categories that barely register for a Manhattan renter but hit Miami households hard, chief among them car ownership, along with rising insurance premiums, private school tuition and restaurant costs that have all climbed there over the past year. South Florida’s consumer price index has risen 36% since 2019, more than any metro area tracked by the government, except Tampa. None of that has much to do with the price of Manhattan real estate.

It’s all about affordability

Michelle Griffith, a broker at Douglas Elliman, has been fielding questions about the report since it published. It’s really about that one word: affordability. “Affordability now in Miami, especially—and listen, I feel really badly for the people who were living in Miami [before this influx of new residents], and now all of a sudden the restaurant costs are going up, the transportation costs are going up, insurance costs are going up, rent is going up, tuition to send your kids to school is going up.” That’s a genuine problem for Miami residents, she added, but there isn’t evidence that Miami has caught up to New York on the numbers that actually move real estate.

“When we really break down the numbers, the jobs are based in New York City,” Griffith said. New York City’s metro area added 86,800 jobs over the year through December 2025, more than double Miami’s total and more than the combined job gains in Dallas, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, according to the NYCEDC’s monthly economic snapshot. In contrast, Miami’s metro area only added 42,600 jobs over the same 12-month stretch, according to BLS regional employment data, less than half of New York’s total, despite Miami posting the faster percentage growth rate of the two metros.

Those growth rates tell the story when taken in context of their metro areas. With nearly 20 million residents, New York’s metro can add 86,800 jobs and still post a modest growth rate of under 1%, while Miami’s smaller, 6.4-million-person region needs only half as many new positions to post a growth rate roughly 50% higher. Simultaneously, there are three times as many people living in the New York metro area than Miami, meaning that on a per-resident basis, Miami is actually generating new jobs at a faster clip than New York: roughly 6.7 new jobs per 1,000 residents in Miami compared with about 4.4 per 1,000 in New York.

“As much as people like to put Miami up against Manhattan, if you look at prime locations and compare that to prime locations in Miami, we are still significantly higher on a price per square foot.” She noted the underlying data compared a broad swath of South Florida against greater New York City. Even Miami’s most expensive enclave, Fisher Island, posted a Q1 2026 price per square foot of $2,391—below Manhattan’s overall condo average of $2,431 per square foot, according to Miller Samuel, a New York City-based real estate appraisal and consulting firm. Set prime Miami against prime Manhattan instead, she said, “it’s not even a contest.”

“That article was really talking about affordability,” she said. “Whereas if you take New York City, our barriers to entry are very high, right? Our price points are very high. Our average rent has always been high.” Miami built its reputation as the place where money went further, which means a rising cost of living there registers as a real shift, while the same costs in New York barely move the needle, because they were already high. “Now they’re having affordability issues, and I think that’s really making people think twice about leaving New York,” Griffith said. “I found those headlines as a very pro-New-York-City stance.”

New York is where everything is

She also said the idea that jobs are following residents south just isn’t true anymore as return to office mandates are slowly bringing about the end of the era of fully remote work. “The jobs and the opportunities are still centered in New York, and Manhattan still offers better long-term real estate fundamentals,” she said. “The world’s wealth and businesses continue to converge in Manhattan. If you want to be in tech, you’re in San Francisco. But finance, fintech, entertainment? There are so many types of businesses that all converge in Manhattan, which gives reason for businesses to be here and people to live here.”

When asked about companies opening satellite offices in cities like Miami, Griffith didn’t dismiss the trend, but she doesn’t see it as a retreat from New York. She pointed to J.P. Morgan as the clearest example. The bank has doubled its Miami office, building out a Florida workforce that now totals roughly 16,400 employees. But in New York, J.P. Morgan employs more than 20,000, its largest single hub, and just opened a $3 billion, 2.5-million-square-foot headquarters built to house 14,000 workers. “These companies aren’t leaving New York,” Griffith said. “They’re adding Florida. New York is still the anchor.”

“There are still so many people in finance which are here because this is the mecca for finance.”

In her experience, the split between the two cities runs along life stage more than price. “If you’re younger and you need a job, you’re coming to New York,” she said, pointing to the city’s job base alongside a school system she says has no real substitute. It’s only once clients retire that she sees real movement south, and even then, it’s rarely a clean break. “That doesn’t always mean that they’re selling their place in New York,” she said. “It just means that they’re also picking up another property in South Florida to have a slower lifestyle.” Some split the calendar rather than the difference; she pointed to clients who still spend summers in the Hamptons because Florida heat that time of year, in her words, “is miserable.”

She pointed to Tribeca’s recovery after September 11, when predictions that the neighborhood was finished gave way, within months, to a rebound that helped make 10013 one of the highest-priced zip codes in the country for two decades running. Just for the week of July 13 to 19, Manhattan logged 27 contracts signed at $4 million and above, according to the Olshan Luxury Market Report, just two fewer than the week before. “This is probably going to be one of my biggest years, and I’ve been doing this over 15 years,” she said.

Whatever Miami has picked up in cost, Griffith said, it hasn’t picked up what New York already had. “You cannot replicate the lifestyle in Manhattan.”