Choose Jacksonville-oriented or St. Augustine-oriented
Match the home to the real work, healthcare and service direction before comparing distant parts of the county.
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Complete Florida county guide
St. Johns
County
Historic St. Augustine, Atlantic beaches, golf communities and expanding suburban areas south of Jacksonville create a polished First Coast gateway.
Sunrise FloridaAtlantic Coast
REGIONAtlantic Coast
COMMUNITIES TO START WITHSt. Augustine · Ponte Vedra Beach · Nocatee · Hastings
LIFESTYLE SIGNALSHistory · Beach living · Growing communities
Start with daily life
What St. Johns County feels like before you choose a neighborhood.
St. Johns County combines historic St. Augustine, Atlantic beaches, Ponte Vedra golf and resort communities, fast-growing northern suburbs and agricultural land around Hastings. North-county households often connect to Jacksonville, while St. Augustine and southern communities follow a separate service and travel pattern.
Tourism, healthcare, education, construction, professional services and regional commuting support the economy. I-95, U.S. 1, A1A and a limited east-west road network make location relative to Jacksonville, the coast and St. Augustine central to the housing decision.
Use two days to scout the county: one across the northern growth corridor and one around St. Augustine and the south. Drive school and work routes, review future road or development plans, and verify flood, evacuation, utilities and association obligations for a sample property.
The numbers that matter if you are moving
- Population
- 306,934Census estimate
- At the last full count
- 273,4252020 Census
- Median age
- 44.2
- Aged 65 and over
- 21.1%
- Under 18
- 21.6%
- Median household income
- $109,839
- Median home value
- $489,200what owners estimate
- Homeownership
- 82.2%
- People per household
- 2.62
- Average commute
- 26.9 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
HistoryBeach livingGrowing communities
Relocation decision desk
Six checks before St. Johns 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.
Review transportation growth
Check current and planned roadway projects, then drive U.S. 1, I-95 or A1A from the actual neighborhood during routine hours.
Open economic data ↗Verify school assignment in growth areas
Use the current district tools for the exact address and review transportation and capacity without relying on a development brochure.
Open school reports ↗Price districts and associations
Include CDD or special-district assessments, association dues, club obligations and planned amenity costs in the total monthly comparison.
Find a county official ↗Check coastal and river flood conditions
Review flood, evacuation, elevation, road access, roof and insurance for barrier-island, Intracoastal and low-lying property.
Open insurance guidance ↗Map healthcare before choosing rural or coastal
Confirm hospital, primary and specialty routes; north, south and interior communities can depend on different networks.
Open health data ↗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.
St. Augustine
St. Augustine provides a historic urban core, tourism economy, Flagler College and established neighborhoods near the coast and Intracoastal Waterway. Compare the city with surrounding unincorporated areas and verify flood, parking and visitor-traffic conditions.
Ponte Vedra Beach
Ponte Vedra Beach offers coastal, golf and gated communities with direct access toward Jacksonville. Price association or club obligations, wind and flood exposure, and the full commute along A1A or through northern corridors.
Nocatee
Nocatee is a large master-planned community in the fast-growing north county with extensive amenities and newer construction. Review district and association obligations, school assignment, buildout plans and travel beyond the community entrance.
Hastings
Hastings represents the county’s agricultural interior with larger parcels and a small-town setting. Confirm well, septic, road, drainage, broadband and travel to healthcare or employment before comparing rural value with coastal convenience.
Five relocation checks
Questions to answer for St. Johns County.
The regional pattern is a starting point. Verify the answer for the exact city, neighborhood and property you are considering.
01History, growth and agriculture share the county
St. Augustine, northern master-planned communities, Ponte Vedra and Hastings offer different housing, services and travel. Compare them as separate markets.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
02Jacksonville expands the employment map
Many north-county residents commute into Duval, while tourism, healthcare, education and construction support local work. The job direction should determine the search radius.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
03Schools and services follow rapid growth
St. Johns County has extensive education and community investment, but assignments and capacity must be verified for the address as new neighborhoods develop.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
04I-95 is the spine; east-west routes are the test
Interstate access supports regional travel, while U.S. 1, A1A and constrained east-west connections can shape the daily trip from coastal or interior communities.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMIT
05Coastal readiness belongs in the budget
Flood, wind, evacuation, building age and insurance differ sharply between the barrier island, Intracoastal, mainland and inland parcels. Verify each property.
VERIFY LOCALLY BEFORE YOU COMMITHospitals in St. Johns County
Three 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.
St. Augustine
Flagler Hospital
335 licensed beds
The state's record ↗St. JohnsUF Health Durbin Park Hospital
99 licensed beds
The state's record ↗St. JohnsAscension St. Vincent's St. Johns County
56 licensed beds
The state's record ↗The state licenses two more hospitals in St. Johns 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.
Castillo de San Marcos
Spain began the Castillo in 1672 and finished it in 1695, after wooden forts had burned or rotted through a century of trying. The material is coquina, a soft stone of shells bonded together, quarried at King's Quarry on Anastasia Island and ferried across Matanzas Bay.
St. Augustine Historic District
St. Augustine was founded by Spain in 1565, making it the oldest permanently settled European city on the mainland of North America north of Mexico. What the historic district protects is not only the buildings but the plan itself.
Anastasia State Park
The park covers 1,700 acres just across the bridge from downtown St. Augustine and takes in four miles of Atlantic beach, reached by boardwalk over the dunes. It was established in 1949. Behind the beach are ancient dunes, tidal salt marsh, and maritime and upland hammock, with Salt Run cutting in from the inlet, and that variety is what brings the birds.
St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum
The tower went up in 1874 and the keepers' house followed in 1876, and both stand at 100 Red Cox Drive on Anastasia Island. Climbing it means 219 steps up a spiral staircase to a gallery with a view over the whole of St. Augustine, the inlet and the Atlantic.
Lightner Museum
Flagler commissioned the Alcazar Hotel in 1887 to hold the overflow of wealthy visitors coming south on his railway. Carrere and Hastings designed it in Spanish Renaissance Revival style and built it of poured concrete, which made it among the earliest poured concrete buildings anywhere.
Flagler College
Henry Flagler made his money at Standard Oil and spent a good deal of it on Florida. The Hotel Ponce de Leon opened on January 10, 1888, as the grandest winter resort in the state, designed by the New York firm Carrere and Hastings as their first major commission.
Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park
Two things are true about this place at once, and the park is worth visiting because of both. The legend is that Ponce de Leon landed here in 1513 and found a spring. No evidence supports it, and the historian Douglas Peck has argued the landing was nearer Melbourne Beach.
Fort Matanzas National Monument
Matanzas means slaughters in Spanish, and the inlet got the name in 1565 when Spanish forces under Menendez executed Jean Ribault and his shipwrecked French Huguenots there. Spain built this tower in 1742 to stop anyone using the inlet as a back way to St. Augustine, after Oglethorpe's forces had shown the weakness.
St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park
The attraction opened on May 20, 1893, at a beach railway station, where a few alligators were added to help sell souvenirs. The alligators turned out to be the draw, and the business moved to its present site on Anastasia Island in the early 1920s.
Vilano Beach
Vilano Beach sits on the barrier island between the Atlantic and the Tolomato River, just north of the St. Augustine inlet. When Henry Flagler's hotels filled with northern visitors, this was where they came to swim.
Ponte Vedra Beach
The place began as a mining camp. Minerals were found here in 1914 and a settlement called Mineral City grew around the work, with the Buckman and Pritchard Mining Company taking titanium, zircon and rutile out of the sand until National Lead Company bought the operation in 1921 and stopped the digging.
Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve
The reserve was designated on August 19, 1999, and covers 76,760 acres across three estuaries, the Guana, the Tolomato and the Matanzas, along with the Atlantic shoreline in front of them. It is a research reserve rather than a park, which means most of it is left alone and studied.
Colonial Quarter
The Colonial Quarter takes up two acres in the middle of the historic district, off St. George Street, and it is the closest thing in the city to walking into the eighteenth century. The site shows life under Spanish rule in the 1740s: interpreters in period dress work a blacksmith's forge, build a ship the way it would have been built then, fire a musket and explain what the work involved.
St. Augustine Pirate & Treasure Museum
Pat Croce collected this over years and moved it here from Key West, opening in St. Augustine on December 8, 2010. It is a real collection rather than a themed walkthrough, and the objects are what make it worth the money.
Old Jail Museum
Henry Flagler wanted the county jail off the land he needed for the Ponce de Leon Hotel, so he struck a deal with St. Johns County for ten thousand dollars and had a new one built away from the tourists. The P.J.
St. Augustine Distillery
The building at 112 Riberia Street was the city's ice plant, put up in 1917 when ice was a serious industry, and it stood empty for years before the distillery took it on. What comes out of it now is made from Florida ingredients: Florida Straight Bourbon and a port-finished version of it, pot-distilled rum, New World Gin and a vodka made from Florida sugar cane.
St. Augustine Aquarium
Shawn and Kathy Hiester spent more than two years planning this before it opened on December 19, 2016, and what they built is not a conventional aquarium. The centerpiece is an 80,000-gallon open-air tank holding over a hundred species native to Florida and the Caribbean, queen angelfish and cownose rays among them, and for an extra charge a visitor can put on a mask and snorkel and get into it.
Ximenez-Fatio House Museum
Andres Ximenez, a merchant, built the house and its detached kitchen in 1798 from coquina quarried on Anastasia Island, in the style known as the St. Augustine Plan, part Spanish colonial and part Federal. It was a good house for its day.
St. Augustine History Museum
The museum sits at 167 San Marco Avenue beside the Old Jail, and Historic Tours of America runs both. The subject is the long version of the city's story rather than any single period, working through the Spanish, the French, the British and then the American years and what each left behind.
Villa Zorayda Museum
Franklin W. Smith was a Boston millionaire with an idea. In 1883 he built himself a winter house in St. Augustine modeled on the twelfth-century Moorish Alhambra Palace at Granada, at roughly a tenth of the original's scale, and named it after a princess in a story by Washington Irving.
Beaches in St. Johns County
Every beach, one clear card.
12BEACH 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.
Ponte Vedra Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
The shoreline of the Ponte Vedra community, about 23 miles north of downtown St. Augustine - wide and quiet, with dunes and boardwalks rather than a built-up front. No vehicles on the sand anywhere along it. Public access is at Mickler's Landing and the South Ponte Vedra Recreation Area, with more walkovers along Ponte Vedra Boulevard that have very little parking. Dogs are allowed on a leash.
Mickler’s Landing Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
1109 Ponte Vedra Boulevard, and the main way onto the Ponte Vedra shoreline. 202 parking spaces, seven of them accessible. Accessible restrooms and showers, and a Mobi-Mat over the roughly 30 feet of soft sand between the lot and the water. Lifeguards from Memorial Day to Labor Day. No vehicles on the sand except emergency ones. Horseback riding is allowed with a permit.
South Ponte Vedra Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
2993 South Ponte Vedra Boulevard. A small county recreation area - 24 parking spaces, two of them accessible - with accessible restrooms, a pavilion and picnic tables. The northern way down is a wooden boardwalk with about 19 steps; the southern one is a path over soft sand. No vehicles on the sand.
Vilano Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
Off Vilano Road, and one of the county ramps you can drive onto the sand from - four-wheel drive only, and no more than 45 vehicles at a time. From March through September every vehicle on the beach needs a pass: $10 for the day, or $50 a year for county residents and $100 for everyone else. 37 parking spaces off the sand, three of them accessible, with accessible restrooms, showers and changing rooms. Three ways down: a Mobi-Mat at the north end, a viewing area in the middle, and about 140 feet of boardwalk with 25 steps at the south. Lifeguards from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and a 40 by 32 foot pavilion with power and an amphitheater behind the dune.
Porpoise Point
St. Johns County, Florida
The ramp sits between 431 and 501 Porpoise Point Drive and takes four-wheel drive vehicles onto the sand, with a pass from March through September. There is no vehicle access onto Porpoise Point itself.
North Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
North Beach Oceanfront Park is closed until further notice. The county has published no reopening date.
Usina Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
A path onto the sand with five parking spaces at the access itself, one of them accessible, and no vehicles except emergency ones. A larger lot on Euclid Avenue adds about 50 more spaces, two of them accessible, and connects to the same path.
St. Augustine Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
The pier park is the heart of it: 211 parking spaces with 13 accessible, accessible restrooms and showers, a fishing pier, a splash park, an 84 by 84 foot pavilion and six sand volleyball courts. The A Street ramp, also in St. Augustine Beach, lets four-wheel drive vehicles onto the sand with a pass from March through September, and that gate closes at 5:00pm every night of the year.
Anastasia State Park Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
Open 8:00am to sundown, 365 days a year. $8 a vehicle for up to eight people, $4 for a single-occupant vehicle, $2 on foot or by bicycle, and camping from $28 a night plus tax. Driving on the sand is prohibited here, unlike most of this county. Restrooms with showers, a dune walkover, lifeguards in season, a snack bar, hiking and biking trails, and enough open water for windsurfing and kayaking.
Butler Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
Frank Butler Park East has 84 parking spaces with four accessible, accessible restrooms, showers, two pavilions, picnic tables and two grills, and a 309-foot boardwalk down to the sand with 21 steps and no ramp. Horseback riding is allowed with a permit. The Mary Street and Gloria Avenue lot nearby holds about 50 informal spaces, lets four-wheel drive vehicles onto the beach with a pass, and has its own 237-foot boardwalk with 18 stairs and lifeguards in season.
Crescent Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
Reached off Cubbedge Road, with 104 parking spaces including four accessible and another 30 to 40 in an overflow lot a 0.15 mile walk away. Four-wheel drive vehicles can go onto the sand here with a pass from March through September. Accessible bathrooms, four outdoor showers, two pavilions with power and picnic tables. The southern boardwalk runs 150 feet with 26 stairs; the northern one is accessible.
Matanzas Inlet Beach
St. Johns County, Florida
At the south end of the county, beside Fort Matanzas, and run by the National Park Service rather than the county. The northern access has 19 parking spaces with two accessible, seasonal portable restrooms, a ramp shared by people and vehicles, and lifeguards from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The southern access has 40 spaces, 18 of them accessible, and no vehicles onto the sand. Horseback riding is not permitted inside the park.
Official planning desk
Check current public information before making the move.
St. Johns County GovernmentOfficial county services, departments, planning and resident information.
Open official source ↗
St. Johns Transportation DevelopmentRoad, transit and long-range transportation planning.
Open official source ↗
St. Johns Emergency ManagementCurrent alerts, plans, evacuation and household preparedness.
Open official source ↗
St. Johns Evacuation AssistanceOfficial shelter transportation and special-needs evacuation options.
Open official source ↗QUESTIONS THAT NAME THIS COUNTY
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