Moving to The Florida Keys
Moving to the Florida Keys means accepting a real, structural transportation and safety reality that no other region in this dataset carries: the entire 113-mile island chain depends on a single road for daily access and hurricane evacuation, and that fact should be treated with the same seriousness as housing cost when deciding whether to relocate here.
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Learn moreThe single-road reality
US-1, the Overseas Highway, is the only road connecting the Keys to the mainland and running the length of the chain -- every resident of Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, or Key West depends on this one route for commuting, supplies, medical emergencies requiring mainland transfer, and hurricane evacuation. There is one partial, limited exception: Card Sound Road (County Road 905A), a secondary route at the very northern end of the chain connecting to Key Largo, but it feeds back into the same US-1/Florida's Turnpike interchange on the mainland and does nothing for the roughly 100 miles of Keys south of Key Largo. For practical purposes, evacuating from Marathon, Islamorada, or Key West means US-1, full stop.
Hurricane evacuation timing
Because of that single-road bottleneck, Monroe County issues evacuation orders earlier and more aggressively than mainland Florida counties do: tourists and mobile-home residents are typically required to leave 48 hours before a hurricane's projected landfall, and permanent residents are told to begin evacuating roughly 24 hours before landfall (recently extended to a 24.5-hour clearance model under 2025's SB 180). This isn't a suggestion or an abundance of caution -- it reflects a genuine, calculated evacuation-clearance time for the Keys' full population given the single available route, and anyone moving here should understand that hurricane season means planning around an earlier, firmer evacuation timeline than most of the rest of Florida.
Getting to and around the Keys day to day
Miami International Airport, roughly an hour's drive from Key Largo but considerably farther from Marathon or Key West, is the region's primary air-travel gateway for most residents and visitors. Key West has its own small regional airport (EYW) with limited direct-flight options, and Marathon has a comparable small commercial field (Florida Keys Marathon International, MTH) -- both real, but neither substitutes for the drive-or-connect reality of getting most places from the Keys. Daily errands, medical specialists, and larger shopping trips for many Keys residents mean a drive up US-1 toward Miami-Dade County rather than finding every service locally.
Housing stock and the practical buying reality
Because ROGO permit caps genuinely limit new construction, buyers should expect to compete for existing housing stock rather than assume new-construction inventory will be readily available -- a structurally different buying environment than most mainland Florida markets in this dataset, where new subdivisions are still actively being built. This scarcity is also what underlies the region's high prices discussed in the cost-of-living topic; it isn't a separate, unrelated fact.
Key takeaways
- The entire Florida Keys chain depends on a single road, US-1/the Overseas Highway, for daily access and hurricane evacuation -- Card Sound Road is a limited, Key Largo-only partial exception that still funnels back to the same mainland interchange.
- Hurricane evacuation orders come earlier and more firmly here than on mainland Florida -- tourists/mobile-home residents out 48 hours before landfall, permanent residents roughly 24-24.5 hours before, per Monroe County's evacuation-clearance model.
- A 2025 state law capped new Keys development to protect evacuation-clearance times, meaning new-construction housing supply is genuinely limited compared to mainland Florida markets.
- Miami International Airport is the primary air gateway for most Keys residents; Key West and Marathon each have small local airports with limited direct-flight options.
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