VacationSelector

Miami or Tampa?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Miami
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on nature & day trips and sights concentration with your weighting.

Tampa
44
match

Wins on museums & heritage and year-round weather with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Miami if the sea is the point: it is swimmable every month, and the centre offers more to walk to, more places to eat and more nightlife, with more protected land for days out.

Choose Tampa if the trip is built around theme parks, 5 within reach against Miami's 2, and if you want a drier autumn.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

MiamiTampa
Beaches & swimming. Miami leads by 20 points.20
MiamiTampa
Score9575
Swim season months128
Beaches 10 km2010
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Miami leads by 11 points.11
MiamiTampa
Score6554
Restaurants within 2 km of centre898359
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2931
Museums & heritage. Tampa leads by 4 points.4
MiamiTampa
Score2327
Museums within 10 km2813
Museums within 2 km of centre610
Share of museums within 2 km %2177
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Miami leads by 11 points.11
MiamiTampa
Score5039
Drinking venues within 4 km538324
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre287227
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5370
Nightclubs within 4 km6326
Nature & day trips. Miami leads by 42 points.42
MiamiTampa
Score7230
Protected land share 50 km %166
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4872
Park area within 2 km50 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Miami leads by 14 points.14
MiamiTampa
Score4430
Tourist attractions within 2 km143
Park area within 2 km50 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km25
Sights concentration. Miami leads by 21 points.21
MiamiTampa
Score4221
Notable places within 2 km4513
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Miami and Tampa are level on 43.
MiamiTampa
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Tampa leads by 1 points.1
MiamiTampa
Score7475
Monthly daytime high24.7 °C to 32.7 °C21.5 °C to 32.6 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 267 mm36 mm to 228 mm
Dry months01
0255075100

Where they differ

Miami has the stronger coast: 20 beaches nearby against Tampa's 10, and sea warm enough for swimming in all 12 months against Tampa's 8. Far more of the surrounding land is protected, and the centre holds around three times as many notable places within walking distance, three times as many restaurants and twice as many places to drink.

Tampa counters with 5 theme parks within reach against Miami's 2, museums clustered more tightly around the centre, and one month with 40mm of rain or less, which Miami never has.

Where they are alike

The weather is the closest match. Both are warm all year, both top out at 33°C in the hottest month, and in both the sea is at its warmest in August, at 30°C.

Museums and heritage are modest in both, and neither has a UNESCO-listed place within day-trip reach. The range of kitchens on offer is similar too, so the difference at the table is one of quantity rather than variety.

Which traveller are you?

If swimming drives the trip, Miami: 20 beaches within reach against Tampa's 10, and sea warm enough to swim in every month of the year rather than eight.

Families building a week around theme parks are better served by Tampa, which has 5 within reach against Miami's 2. Families wanting attractions and park space on foot from the centre will do better in Miami.

For a city break spent eating, drinking and walking, Miami: more restaurants and more places to drink near the centre, and far more notable places within walking distance. In Tampa the smaller offering is at least tightly grouped around the centre.

What the numbers don't tell you

No cost comparison is possible here. Neither city carries a daily budget figure in this dataset, and the value figure shown is a national price level, identical for both by construction, so it says nothing about which of the two is the cheaper trip.

The sunshine series is missing for Miami, since no nearby station records it, so that side of the weather comparison is unmeasured rather than weak. A strong showing on beaches also hides the calendar: Miami's sea is warmest in August, which is also among its wettest months, past 240mm, so the best swimming coincides with the heaviest rain.

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Miami
25
26
27
29
31
32
33
33
32
30
28
26
Tampa
22
23
25
28
31
32
32
33
32
29
26
23
Sea temperature, °C
Miami
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Tampa
18
18
20
23
26
28
30
30
29
27
23
20
Rainfall, mm
Miami
47
55
63
85
157
267
186
242
259
193
90
62
Tampa
66
66
64
64
67
187
197
228
156
60
36
65
Daylight, hours per day
Miami
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Tampa
11
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Miami
No sunshine record
Tampa
7
7
9
10
11
10
9
10
8
8
7
7

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Miami: 1991-2020 normals, Miami International Airport (10 km from centre). Tampa: 1991-2020 normals, Tampa International Airport (7.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Miami is at its best from November to March: highs of 25-28°C, sea at 25-27°C and rainfall of 47-90mm. Summer stays hot but wet, with the wettest months past 250mm. Anyone travelling for the water, not the heat, should aim at that window.

Tampa reads better in spring and autumn. April gives 28°C with 64mm of rain, and autumn is drier again, at 36-60mm. Its winter sea, at 18°C, is too cold for swimming, which Miami's never is.

Getting there

Flying fromMiamiTampa
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 45 m
€205-247
MIA · 7 km
2 h 35 m
€178-237
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
2 h 55 m
€143-193
MIA · 7 km
2 h 35 m
€176-204
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 0 m
€202-362
MIA · 7 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
2 h 25 m
€127-180
MIA · 7 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
RaleighRDU
2 h 0 m
€156-181
MIA · 7 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
Punta CanaPUJ
2 h 25 m
no fares
MIA · 7 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
HoustonIAH, HOU
2 h 30 m
€103-188
1 stop
MIA · 7 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€97-175
MIA · 7 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
MadridMAD
9 h 0 m
€522-631
1 stop
MIA · 7 km
8 h 55 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
15 h 30 m
€891-1074
2 stops
MIA · 7 km
15 h 20 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureMiamiTampa
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation2 m30 m
Main airportMiami International Airport (MIA)7 km from centre199 non-stop destinationsTampa International Airport (TPA)8 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureMiamiTampa
City population442,241384,959
People per km²3,046848
Museums within 10 km176
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3947
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months8 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Miami or Tampa somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.