Choose east, central or west
Match the home search to the real employment corridor; an east-west Broward commute can matter more than north-south county mileage.
Open economic data ↗
Complete Florida county guide
Broward
County
A densely connected metropolitan county with beaches, canals, established suburban cities, a major airport and central access to the South Florida corridor.
Tropical FloridaSouth Florida & the Keys
REGIONSouth Florida & the Keys
COMMUNITIES TO START WITHFort Lauderdale · Hollywood · Pembroke Pines · Coral Springs
LIFESTYLE SIGNALSMetro access · Boating · Careers
Start with daily life
What Broward County feels like before you choose a neighborhood.
Broward County is a dense metropolitan bridge between Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County. Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood provide coastal and urban options, while Pembroke Pines, Coral Springs and other western cities offer established suburban patterns near the Everglades edge.
Marine industries, tourism, aviation, healthcare, logistics, education and professional services support a broad economy. I-95, Florida’s Turnpike, the Sawgrass Expressway, Tri-Rail and county transit help connect the region, but east-west travel and peak-hour congestion often determine whether a home works.
Scout Broward by corridor. Compare one east-side community and one western city, drive the actual work route, check transit only if you can test the full trip, and review flood, evacuation, condo or association conditions for a real sample property.
The numbers that matter if you are moving
- Population
- 1,977,129Census estimate
- At the last full count
- 1,944,3752020 Census
- Median age
- 41.3
- Aged 65 and over
- 17.9%
- Under 18
- 20.8%
- Median household income
- $77,633
- Median home value
- $414,600what owners estimate
- Homeownership
- 63.6%
- People per household
- 2.60
- Average commute
- 29.1 minutes
U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, published January 2026, read September 19, 2026. Survey figures are estimates; median home value is what owners estimate their home is worth, not a sale price.
COUNTY LIFESTYLE THEMES
Metro accessBoatingCareers
Relocation decision desk
Six checks before Broward County becomes the answer.
Do not rely on a countywide impression for an address-level decision. Use these questions during the shortlist, scouting and offer stages.
Test the complete transit trip
Include parking, walking, transfers and the final destination when considering Tri-Rail, buses or regional rail.
Open economic data ↗Review building and association health
For condos and association communities, inspect reserves, assessments, inspections, insurance and current rules before comparing monthly cost.
Find a county official ↗Check flood and evacuation conditions
Review flood information, drainage, hurricane evacuation, roof or opening protection and road access for the exact property.
Open insurance guidance ↗Map healthcare across the metro
Confirm hospital and specialty routes in the correct insurance network; a provider may be nearby but difficult to reach across peak traffic.
Open health data ↗Verify city-specific services
Broward contains many municipalities. Confirm utilities, permitting, emergency information and local taxes or fees for the actual city and parcel.
Open Census estimates ↗Communities to compare
Begin with the county’s major places.
These are starting points, not a ranking. Add nearby towns and neighborhoods as you learn your daily route and housing priorities.
Fort Lauderdale
Fort Lauderdale combines downtown towers, waterfront neighborhoods, a major marine economy, beaches, airport access and older residential districts. Compare parking, bridge or rail access, flood exposure and condo finances block by block.
Hollywood
Hollywood offers a historic downtown, broad residential neighborhoods and an oceanfront district connected by east-west routes. Distinguish beach and mainland living, then test I-95, airport and healthcare access.
Pembroke Pines
Pembroke Pines is a large western suburban city with planned communities, schools, shopping and access toward I-75. Measure eastbound work trips, association costs and the distance to coastal destinations before choosing on space alone.
Coral Springs
Coral Springs provides a planned northwest Broward setting with established neighborhoods and family-oriented services. The tradeoff is distance from the coastal employment spine, so test Sawgrass Expressway and surface-road travel at routine hours.
Five relocation checks
Questions to answer for Broward County.
The regional pattern is a starting point. Verify the answer for the exact city, neighborhood and property you are considering.
01Density does not create one market
Urban waterfront, beach, older suburban and western planned communities sit close on a map but differ sharply in housing type, association structure, flood risk and travel patterns.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
02Marine, aviation and services drive work
Fort Lauderdale’s marine sector, airport and tourism join healthcare, logistics, education and professional services across the county. Locate the job center before selecting east or west.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
03Regional care and education require route testing
Hospital systems, Broward College and specialty providers are widely available, yet dense traffic can make a nearby option inconvenient. Test the address-to-provider trip.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
04North-south options meet east-west constraints
I-95, the Turnpike, I-75, the Sawgrass Expressway and rail support regional movement. The surface-road connection between home and those spines often becomes the daily bottleneck.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
05Water comes from coast and rain
Storm surge is not the only concern. Heavy rain, drainage, canals, building elevation and access roads should be reviewed along with the hurricane evacuation plan.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMITHospitals in Broward County
Eighteen hospitals with an emergency room.
From the state's own hospital list. Each card opens the state's record for that hospital: its address, phone, services and inspection reports.
Hollywood
Memorial Regional Hospital
854 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Fort LauderdaleBroward Health Medical Center
609 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Fort LauderdaleHoly Cross Hospital
557 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Pembroke PinesMemorial Hospital West
486 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Lauderdale LakesFlorida Medical Center
459 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Pompano BeachBroward Health North
409 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Pembroke PinesMemorial Hospital Pembroke
301 licensed beds
The state's record ↗MargateHCA Florida Northwest Hospital
289 licensed beds
The state's record ↗PlantationHCA Florida Westside Hospital
250 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Coral SpringsBroward Health Coral Springs
243 licensed beds
The state's record ↗WestonCleveland Clinic Hospital
236 licensed beds
The state's record ↗HollywoodMemorial Regional Hospital South
216 licensed beds
The state's record ↗TamaracHCA Florida Woodmont Hospital
213 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Fort LauderdaleBroward Health Imperial Point
204 licensed beds
The state's record ↗MiramarMemorial Hospital Miramar
178 licensed beds
The state's record ↗DavieHCA Florida University Hospital
165 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Fort LauderdaleNicklaus Children's Hospital Fort Lauderdale
114 licensed beds
The state's record ↗Coral SpringsNicklaus Children's Hospital Coral Springs
35 licensed beds
The state's record ↗The state licenses seven more hospitals in Broward County with no emergency room; its list names them.
How do I compare hospitals in Florida? →How do I find a doctor who takes Medicare? →Search the state's hospital list ↗
Source: Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, FloridaHealthFinder, Locate a Facility (hospitals), read September 25, 2026.
Evergreen county experiences
20 places that reveal the county.
Use enduring natural, historic and cultural places to understand the area beyond a real-estate showing.
Bonnet House Museum & Gardens
Hugh Taylor Birch, a Chicago lawyer, property investor and naturalist, bought this stretch of oceanfront in 1895. In 1919 he gave a piece of it to his daughter Helen and her husband, the Chicago artist Frederic Clay Bartlett, as a wedding gift, and Bartlett built the house the following year.
Hugh Taylor Birch State Park
Birch was a Chicago attorney who came to south Florida in 1893 looking for somewhere quiet to build. He found a small village called Fort Lauderdale and started buying oceanfront at roughly a dollar an acre, ending up with a stretch three and a half miles long; his own estate ran to 180 acres.
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
The building it uses now opened in 1986 and was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. It runs to 83,000 square feet, of which more than 25,000 are exhibition space, and the collection holds more than 25,000 works.
Flamingo Gardens
It is one of the oldest places of its kind in South Florida. More than three thousand species of plant grow here, rare, exotic, tropical, subtropical and native, under a canopy of old trees that has been left to mature for close to a century.
Museum of Discovery and Science
It began in 1976 as the Discovery Center and opened to the public the following year. The present building opened in November 1992, paid for by a capital campaign of thirty-three million dollars, and the museum now takes about 425,000 visitors a year, including some 90,000 schoolchildren on field trips.
Sawgrass Recreation Park
Sawgrass Recreation Park runs airboat tours into the Everglades from the western edge of Broward County, on US 27 at Weston, and it is family owned and operated. Several kinds of trip are offered: standard airboat adventures, private and exclusive runs, eco tours, and a Gator Nights tour after dark.
Butterfly World
Around twenty thousand live butterflies of some fifty species are in the air here at any one time. Ronald Boender, a retired electrical engineer, founded it with Clive Farrell, who had started the London Butterfly House.
Anne Kolb Nature Center
The Anne Kolb Nature Center sits in West Lake Park at Hollywood and protects what is described as one of the largest urban mangrove forests remaining in Florida. The tower is the thing people climb: five levels, 68 feet above sea level, with stairs and an elevator.
Historic Stranahan House Museum
Frank Stranahan came here in 1893 and set up trading with the Seminoles. The building he put up in 1901 had the trading post on the ground floor and a community hall above it. Seminole families came down the New River by dugout canoe and camped at the post for days at a time while they traded.
Hollywood Beach Broadwalk
Joseph Young bought the land in 1921 and set out to build what he called the Atlantic City of south Florida. The first stretch, a mile and a half of it, was finished by 1923.
Fort Lauderdale Beach
Spring break started here in 1956. By 1961 fifty thousand college students were arriving each season, and the 1960 film Where the Boys Are, shot in the city and premiered that December at the Gateway Theatre, turned the place into a national fixture.
Quiet Waters Park
It is built around water. Ski Rixen is a cable wakeboarding and water ski system, one of seventy-nine of its kind in the world and the only cable wake and ski operation in South Florida: an overhead cable tows the rider around the lake, so there is no boat, no fuel and no wake behind you.
Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park
It opened in 1953 as a segregated beach, the one stretch of sand Broward County would allow Black residents to use, and it existed at all only after years of pressure from Dr. Von D. Mizell, a surgeon, and Eula Johnson, who led the local chapter of the NAACP.
Young At Art Museum
Young At Art is an interactive art museum, and since March 2021 it has been inside the Broward Mall at Plantation, at 8000 West Broward Boulevard. It was in a 24,000 square foot leased building in Davie until September 2020, when Broward County brought that lease to an end.
Las Olas Boulevard
Las Olas Boulevard runs from downtown Fort Lauderdale out to the ocean, and its own association calls it the heart of the city. Along it are restaurants, shops, art galleries, museums and independent boutiques, and the street carries on all the way to the beach.
Water Taxi Fort Lauderdale
The Water Taxi is a boat service rather than a sightseeing cruise, and for a good part of Fort Lauderdale it is a real way of getting about. Its own stop list names twenty-three landings across three routes.
Everglades Holiday Park
Everglades Holiday Park has been operating since June 1982, on 29 acres of wetland at the western end of Griffin Road off US 27. The airboat trip is a guided hour, running at 35 to 45 miles an hour, with the captain pointing out alligators and other wildlife along the way.
Secret Woods Nature Center
Secret Woods covers 56 acres beside the New River at Dania Beach, and in 1978 it was designated the first urban wilderness area in Florida. Broward County opened it as its first nature center in 1979 and still runs it.
Plantation Historical Museum
The Plantation Historical Museum building was unveiled in 1985, behind the Helen B. Hoffman Plantation Library in Botanical Gardens Park. A Fire Museum Annex opened shortly afterwards and the museum was expanded again in 2008.
Fern Forest Nature Center
Fern Forest protects 244 acres of the original floodplain of Cypress Creek at Coconut Creek, and Broward County has run it since 1979. Thirty-four species of fern grow in it, among them sword and marsh ferns and the giant leather fern.
Beaches in Broward County
Every beach, one clear card.
11BEACH DESTINATIONS
Each card gives the beach, its visit category and its next steps: the practical visit guide, the official site where the beach has one, and directions. Always verify current parking, fees, water quality, lifeguard coverage and posted rules before leaving.
STANDARD PUBLIC BEACH
Not identified here as clothing-optional. This category does not guarantee child safety, calm water or lifeguard coverage.
CLOTHING-OPTIONAL
Nudity is officially permitted in all or part of the destination. Read the current notice before taking children.
NUDITY ADVISORY
Nudity may be encountered in a remote area even without an official clothing-optional designation.
Deerfield Beach
Broward County, Florida
A mile of guarded sand with nine lifeguard towers, worked 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day of the year by a crew certified by the United States Lifesaving Association. The Clean Beaches Council has given it Blue Wave status for water quality, beach conditions, safety and habitat. Surfing is allowed north of the pier and south of tower 7, and the volleyball courts and recreation areas are on the north side of the pier. No dogs and no alcohol. Conditions are on 954-480-4413.
Hillsboro Beach
Broward County, Florida
Three miles of barrier island between the Intracoastal Waterway and the ocean, about 900 feet across at its widest, with one road running the length of it. The town is almost entirely residential: around 2,000 people, about 50 single-family houses, the rest condominiums, one hotel and no commercial property at all. The Hillsboro Lighthouse stands at the inlet, finished in 1907 and 138 feet tall, and the preservation society runs tours on a limited basis. The town protects a high concentration of sea turtle nests.
Pompano Beach
Broward County, Florida
Twelve hundred yards of beach patrolled by an ocean rescue crew certified by the United States Lifesaving Association: seventeen full-time and twenty-five part-time lifeguards, every one of them a first responder or an emergency medical technician carrying a defibrillator and oxygen. The Clean Beaches Council has given it Blue Wave status. The main way in is where Atlantic Boulevard meets North Pompano Beach Boulevard. Conditions are on 954-786-4005.
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea Beach
Broward County, Florida
Two and a half miles of sand with a living coral reef inside 100 yards of it, which is why divers and snorkelers come here from across the state. Seven beach portals open off El Mar Drive, each named for a townsperson and fitted with showers, benches and chairs: Pine Avenue, Washingtonia, El Prado, the Beach Pavilion and Ocean Plaza, Datura, Hibiscus and Palm. Datura has a wooden bench for divers to gear up on. El Prado Park and Washingtonia Park both sit on the ocean.
Fort Lauderdale Beach
Broward County, Florida
The city's main beachfront, with the waterfront walkway running along it. Fort Lauderdale Beach Park at 1100 Seabreeze Boulevard has restrooms, outdoor showers, picnic tables, grills, a playground, a volleyball court, a basketball court and a launch for boats without motors. Canine Beach, the one stretch of this beach where dogs are allowed, is at 1269 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard.
D.C. Alexander Park
Broward County, Florida
A small city park on the sand at 501 South Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard, near the south end of the beachfront. The city lists it with open ground and a waterfront edge and nothing else, so it is a place to sit and look at the water rather than a park with facilities.
Las Olas Beach
Broward County, Florida
The beach at the ocean end of Las Olas Boulevard, with Las Olas Oceanside Park behind it at number 3000: restrooms, outdoor showers, a drinking fountain, a splash pad for children, a walking path, park benches, bicycle racks and open ground.
Dania Beach
Broward County, Florida
The city beach, on the same shoreline as the state park a little way along. Parking is $5 an hour, paid at the meter or through the PayByPhone app using lot number 13050, and the city's beach rangers enforce it around the clock. No overnight parking, no backing into a space, and no trailers, recreational vehicles or semi-trucks. Residents can apply for a discounted annual beach pass.
Hollywood Beach
Broward County, Florida
The Broadwalk runs nearly two and a half miles along the sand here, brick paved and open to walkers, joggers, cyclists and skaters. On it are the Hollywood Beach Theatre and a children's water playground at Charnow Park. Step-free beach access is at Carolina, Connecticut, Johnson, New York, Tyler, Harrison and Oregon Streets and between Iris and Magnolia Terraces. Park in the Garfield, Nevada Street or Margaritaville garages, or at a meter on the street.
Earl Lifshey Ocean Park
Broward County, Florida
A small city park on the ocean at 3054 North Ocean Boulevard, at the north end of the Fort Lauderdale beachfront. The city lists open ground and a waterfront edge, so it is somewhere to stop and sit rather than a park with facilities.
Dr. Von D. Mizell–Eula Johnson State Park Beach
Broward County, Florida
At 6503 North Ocean Drive in Dania Beach, open 8 a.m. until sunset, 365 days a year, for $6 a vehicle. The park is named for Dr. Von D. Mizell and Eula Johnson, who led the wade-in protests that desegregated South Florida's beaches, and the land was once the county's designated beach for Black residents. It is the last undeveloped coastal ecosystem in Broward County, with mangrove waterways and the endangered beach jacquemontia flowering from November to May. A boat ramp, nature trails, picnic pavilions, restrooms and showers, and dogs are allowed.
Official planning desk
Check current public information before making the move.
Broward County GovernmentOfficial county services, agencies and resident information.
Open official source ↗
Broward County TransitFixed-route, paratransit, schedules and current county transportation information.
Open official source ↗
Broward Hurricane InformationCurrent county evacuation, shelter, alert and storm-preparation guidance.
Open official source ↗
Broward Emergency TransportationTransit and transportation information for hurricane evacuations.
Open official source ↗QUESTIONS THAT NAME THIS COUNTY
- Where Do Cruise Ships Leave From in Florida?
- Where Do Cruise Ships Leave From in Fort Lauderdale?
- How Much Do Houses Cost in Florida?
- Which Florida Counties Are the Most Expensive to Buy a Home In?
- What Are the Biggest Counties and Cities in Florida?
- What Are the Laws for Strip Clubs and Adult Entertainment in Florida?
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