South Florida and Keys Hospitality Report: September 2026

This report covers hotels, restaurants, bars, marinas, water tours, and short-term rentals in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Monroe (the Florida Keys). The numbers here mostly come from public sources like state tax records, federal employment and price stats, airport boardings, county tourist tax collections, and statewide visitor estimates. When the text calls it out, the figures are from Pixedi's own random sample of local hospitality websites, pulled in late September 2026.

Key findings

• The four counties took in $14.42 billion in lodging gross sales in 2025, up from $10.11 billion in 2019, but the regional consumer price index rose 32.2% in that time, so most of that extra money reflects higher prices.
• Adjusted for regional inflation, Miami-Dade lodging gross sales were basically flat at -0.1% from 2019 to 2025, and the county's accommodation employment in 2025 was 8.3% below 2019.
• Restaurant sales in the four counties grew about 10.2% in real terms from 2019 to 2025, after food price inflation, which is more than the hotels managed.
• In the Florida Keys, lodging accounted for 27.4% of all gross sales reported to the state in 2025, and leisure and hospitality made up 44.6% of private employment.
• Preliminary state data for the first quarter of 2026 shows Broward lodging sales dropped 13.0% and Palm Beach fell 9.5% compared with the same months in 2025.
• Miami International recorded 26.45 million boardings in 2025, which is 23.5% above 2019, while Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood sat 12.8% below its 2019 count.
• VISIT FLORIDA says Canadian visits to Florida fell 6.8% in 2025 and were 22.4% below 2019.
• In Pixedi's sample, 13.8% of hospitality websites were broken and only 39.4% of reachable sites carried the structured business markup that search engines and AI assistants read first.
• Counting every sampled lodging business, only 37.4% had a reachable website with a direct booking engine Pixedi could identify.

Sales and prices since 2019

Lodging in the four counties reported $14.42 billion in gross sales to the Florida Department of Revenue for 2025, up from $10.11 billion in 2019, which is a 42.6% bump. But the consumer price index for the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area went up 32.2% in that same stretch, so a lot of that extra money is just higher rates and costs passed through. It's not as much new business as the numbers suggest.

• Palm Beach70.9%
• Monroe46%
• Broward42.4%
• Miami-Dade32%

Source: Florida Department of Revenue

Palm Beach moved the fastest, with lodging sales up 70.9% in nominal terms, while Monroe sat at 46.0% and Broward at 42.4%. Miami-Dade grew 32.0%, the slowest of the group, but when you strip out the regional price index, its lodging sales actually dropped 0.1% between 2019 and 2025. So Miami-Dade has stood still in real money while Palm Beach pulled ahead.

Restaurants show more real growth. The four counties reported $23.44 billion in restaurant gross sales for 2025, which is a 47.3% jump from 2019. When you take out the 33.7% rise in food prices, that leaves about 10.2% in real growth, a better result than the flat numbers Miami-Dade hotels are showing.

Visitors and air access

VISIT FLORIDA estimates 143.3 million out-of-state and international visitors came to Florida in 2025, which is just 0.2% higher than 2024. Canadian visits dropped to an estimated 3.2 million, down 6.8% from the previous year and 22.4% below 2019 levels, while overseas visits hit 9.3 million, still 5.1% under where they were in 2019. If your business depended on Canadian winter guests before 2019, you're working with a smaller pool now.

The traffic is moving toward Miami. Miami International recorded 26.45 million boardings in 2025, which is 23.5% above 2019. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood went the other way with 15.65 million boardings, down 8.5% from 2024 and 12.8% below 2019. Palm Beach International, listed by the FAA under the code DJT for 2025, was 23.0% above 2019, while Key West International recorded 760,753 boardings, 52.9% above 2019.

The Fort Lauderdale figures are worth reading next to Broward's lodging data. Broward was the only county whose main airport handled fewer boardings in 2025 than in 2019, and it also shows the weakest early 2026 lodging sales of the four counties (covered in the next section). The data does not prove one causes the other, but a Broward operator who depends on fly-in guests has reason to watch both series together.

County dependence, seasons and 2026 so far

It matters where you sit in the mix. In Monroe County, lodging accounted for 27.4% of all gross sales reported to the state in 2025, and lodging and restaurants together made up 38.5%. In Miami-Dade, lodging was 2.5% of reported gross sales. So when the season slows down, it hits almost every business in the Keys, but in Miami-Dade it's just one slice of the pie.

• Broward-13%
• Palm Beach-9.5%
• Monroe3.2%
• Miami-Dade0.1%

Source: Florida Department of Revenue

In Monroe, the peak lodging month in 2025 did 3.25 times the business of the weakest one, and the four reporting months January to April carried 43.5% of the county's 2025 lodging sales. Broward was much flatter with a 1.83 ratio between its best and worst months. If you run a place in the Keys, those months set the pace for the rest of the year, so you have to plan your cash flow around that swing.

The January to March 2026 state sales figures are still coming in, so they're preliminary, but compared to the same months last year, Broward lodging gross sales dropped 13.0% and Palm Beach fell 9.5%, while Monroe rose 3.2% and Miami-Dade edged up 0.1%. The Palm Beach bed tax numbers tell a different story, with gross collections from September 2025 to July 2026 up 10.2% against the prior year, and July 2026 specifically jumping 39.5% over July 2025. Since these two sources track different periods and things, we'd treat the weak first quarter as just one data point and wait to see how the tax series updates.

In the Keys, Monroe County collected $60.8 million from its 4% tourist development tax in fiscal 2025. That was 11.9% below the fiscal 2022 peak but 52.7% above fiscal 2019, so the Keys are well above where they started in 2019 while still short of the high point.

Labor and pay

Leisure and hospitality employed 365,849 private-sector workers across the four counties in 2025, on an annual average basis. That share hits 44.6% of private employment in Monroe but just 13.4% in Miami-Dade. Since 2019, accommodation jobs changed by only 1.0% and food service by 4.2%, while the number of restaurant and bar establishments jumped 10.1%, so more places are chasing a workforce that barely moved.

Miami-Dade accommodation employment averaged 29,843 in 2025, 8.3% fewer than in 2019, even though nominal lodging gross sales climbed 32%. Since real sales barely moved, the extra revenue per worker points to tighter staffing.

Wages rose well past the general price increases. Between 2019 and 2025, average annual pay in restaurants and bars across the four counties went up 50.8%, while accommodation pay climbed 45.1%, both well above the 32.2% rise in the regional price index. In Monroe County, the average annual pay for restaurant and bar workers hit $41,417 in 2025, a 40.1% jump from 2019. So labor now eats a bigger slice of every dollar you bring in, which means anyone setting menu prices or room rates has to factor that in.

The first quarter of 2026 brought a small decline. Four-county leisure and hospitality employment changed by -0.8% from the first quarter of 2025, and accommodation employment by -2.6%. Miami-Dade accommodation employment changed by -6.2%, while Broward's changed by 7.7%, an odd pairing with Broward's weak preliminary lodging sales for the same months.

Competition, small operators and rentals

Out of the 13,766 accommodation and food service establishments in the four counties in 2023, 1,715 opened and 1,284 closed according to Census Business Dynamics Statistics. That's a 12.5% entry rate against a 9.3% exit rate, so new places are arriving faster than old ones are disappearing. It is a market where roughly one in eleven existing spots closes in a given year, and the influx is outpacing that turnover.

Much of the sector is small. Back in 2023, 27.6% of hotel and motel establishments across the four counties had fewer than five employees. In Monroe County, County Business Patterns counted 92 water sightseeing and charter establishments that same year, the highest number in the region, and 75.0% of them operated with fewer than five people. That's often just the owner, so when the phone rings, it's the same person who's out on the boat.

Preliminary state data put gross sales for the category covering parking lots, boat docking and storage at $1.30 billion for 2025, which is about three times where it sat in 2019. That's a 203.7% jump. The four counties had 264 private marina establishments, and they averaged 3,197 employees in 2025. That workforce grew by 36.9% over the same span.

In Broward, short-term rentals are a big rival, and the June 2026 Inside Airbnb snapshot shows 17,698 listings in the county, with 83.5% being entire homes or apartments. The hosts holding multiple listings control 74.1% of the stock, and those with ten or more properties account for 39.3%, so much of this inventory sits with multi-listing hosts. The median advertised nightly price sits at $262, and 68.9% of the listings had at least one review in the last twelve months. Inside Airbnb's model estimates the trailing twelve-month revenue for Broward listings at about $338.6 million, though that figure is still a preliminary estimate.

Digital presence: what Pixedi measured

In late September 2026, Pixedi drew a random sample of 304 hospitality businesses with a website listed on OpenStreetMap in the four counties, from a frame of 1,963 such listings. Of the sampled sites, 241 returned a usable page to a plain request, and 79.3% of all sampled websites led to a usable page. Another 13.8% were broken (DNS, SSL, timeout or an error page), and 6.9% blocked an automated request outright. Restaurant sites were broken more often than lodging sites (16.5% against 14.8%). Roughly one in seven owners in this sample has a broken site today.

• Restaurants53.3%
• Lodging50.6%
• Marinas35.7%
• Tours and charters31.8%

Source: Pixedi

Among the sites we could actually reach, 47.3% had a direct booking, reservation, or ordering system built in, though that varied by type with 50.6% of lodging sites, 53.3% of restaurants, 35.7% of marinas, and 31.8% of tour and charter operators. When we counted every sampled lodging business, including the ones that were dead or blocked, only 37.4% had a reachable site with a booking engine Pixedi could identify. Another 34.1% of reachable lodging sites showed a button that looked like it booked a room, but we couldn't find the engine in the code, so it probably leads to a phone call, email, form or a script-loaded tool. About 12.9% of those reachable lodging sites had no booking path at all, and 2.4% sent visitors straight to an online travel agency. The marina situation is rougher, with 52.4% of reachable marina websites showing no way to reserve a slip.

The region's second language is barely present online. Only 10.4% of reachable hospitality websites declare a Spanish version with an hreflang tag, and 16.2% offer any non-English option at all. Restaurants were lowest at 8.7%. Miami-Dade did better at 21.1%, and 20.0% of reachable lodging websites declare a Spanish version.

Most sites get the basics right, with 97.1% on HTTPS and 93.8% declaring a mobile viewport, but the details that turn a visit into a booking are often missing. Only 60.2% have a tap-to-call link and 66.0% load a standard analytics tool, while just 12.0% load the Meta (Facebook) pixel. Schema.org business markup appears on only 39.4% of sites, which makes them harder for search engines and AI assistants to read, and on restaurant pages, 83.7% link a menu from the home page but only 50.0% show a dollar price. Lodging sites show a dollar rate 35.3% of the time, and the median home page weighed 166 KB of HTML before images and scripts even loaded.

What changed since the last edition

This is the first edition, and the next one will measure how these numbers moved. The newest data here is state lodging sales from January to March 2026, employment for that same quarter, Palm Beach bed tax up through the July 2026 industry month, the short-term rental snapshot from June 2026, and Pixedi's website sample from late September 2026.

Methodology and sources

Gross sales figures come from the Florida Department of Revenue's reported gross sales by kind code (hotels and other transient lodging, restaurants, and parking lots, boat docking and storage), covering annual data for 2019 to 2025 and the January to March 2026 reporting months. Inflation adjustments use the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for all urban consumers in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area, both all items and food away from home, for 2019 to 2025.

We pulled the employment and pay numbers from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, using annual averages for 2019 through 2025 and monthly counts for the first quarter of 2026. For business openings, closures, entry rates, and exit rates, we looked at the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics for 2023, while the establishment size counts came from County Business Patterns for the same year. FAA data gave us the passenger boardings for calendar 2025, and VISIT FLORIDA provided the 2025 visitor estimates. The tourist tax figures are from Palm Beach County bed tax collections covering industry months through July 2026 and Monroe County tourist development tax collections for fiscal years 2019 to 2025. We got the short-term rental numbers from the Inside Airbnb snapshot of Broward County taken in June 2026.

Website figures are Pixedi's own measurement. The sampling frame held 1,963 OpenStreetMap hospitality points of interest with a website tag in the four counties, from which Pixedi drew a random sample of 304 businesses, one site per domain, in late September 2026. The sample included 85 reachable lodging websites, 92 reachable restaurant websites, 42 reachable marina websites and 22 reachable tour and charter websites. Booking systems, language options, markup and tracking tags were detected from the page source returned to a plain request, so tools loaded later by scripts may be missed.

Several figures are preliminary. The first quarter 2026 lodging sales changes for all four counties are not yet final, and neither are the 2025 gross sales for parking lots, boat docking and storage or their growth from 2019. The modeled twelve-month revenue for Broward short-term rentals is part of that pending list. From Pixedi's sample, the booking system shares for lodging, restaurants, marinas, and tours are not final, nor are the breakdowns for lodging sites with no booking path, those linking only to travel agencies, or those with a button but no identifiable engine. The marina no-booking share, the overall lodging booking share, the broken-site rates for restaurants and lodging, the non-English shares for restaurants and Miami-Dade, the Spanish hreflang share for lodging, and the menu and price display shares for restaurants and lodging all remain preliminary.

Sources

1. Florida Department of Revenue
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
3. Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages
4. Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics
5. Census Bureau County Business Patterns
6. Federal Aviation Administration
7. VISIT FLORIDA
8. Inside Airbnb
9. OpenStreetMap

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