Can you park the boat at your house? Depends whose rules the driveway obeys.

In Jacksonville’s residential zoning, boats, RVs, and utility trailers must be parked behind or beside the house, meeting the front-yard setback — the classic not-in-the-front-yard rule. Unincorporated St. Johns County runs the same doctrine: recreational vehicles, boats, and trailers belong in the rear or side yard, and the county has a documented history of enforcement sweeps when complaints stack up. Neither jurisdiction bans keeping the boat at home; both ban displaying it out front.

Jacksonville Beach wrote the exception worth knowing by heart: boats 20 feet or shorter may be parked in the driveway, while anything longer — plus RVs, campers, and haul trailers — goes behind the front setback, and street parking in residential areas is loading-and-unloading only. Atlantic Beach and Neptune Beach administer their own zoning codes separately, so their versions are confirm-per-town facts; the pattern across all of them rhymes, but the numbers are the town’s to set. The fishable-water homes this question usually serves →

Inside a deed-restricted community the government code is only the floor: HOAs routinely prohibit visible boat and RV parking outright, garage-only rules included, and covenant enforcement is far more attentive than any code officer. Florida law has recently trimmed some HOA parking powers, and the details keep moving — which is exactly why I read the actual covenants for any buyer with a trailer, rather than repeating a rule that may have been amended in either direction.

The escape hatches are real, though. Palm Valley remains the honest headline: mostly no HOA at all, acreage lots, and boats living beside houses as a matter of culture. And a newer generation of master plans simply built the answer in — the Landings at Greenbriar’s amenity campus includes RV and boat storage, and Del Webb Saint Johns is building on-site RV and boat storage into its club plan. On-site storage turns the whole three-rulebook problem into a monthly line item, and it belongs on the criteria list for any trailer-owning buyer comparing communities. Palm Valley — no HOA, real docks →

When the driveway is off the table, a boat lives in one of three places. A wet slip keeps it in the water at a marina, ready to go, and exposed to growth on the hull and to storms. A dry stack keeps it on a rack inside a building: you call ahead, a forklift puts it in the water, and it goes back on the rack when you return. A storage lot keeps it on its trailer, and you tow it to a ramp each time.

Dry stack is how most center consoles and bay boats here live, and the racks sit on the Intracoastal near Beach Boulevard, on the Ortega and San Sebastian rivers and in Fernandina Beach (the table lists them from each marina’s own site). Two publish their rates. Palm Cove Marina charges $18.50 to $19.50 a foot per month on a yearly contract, or $24 a foot month to month, with unlimited launches. Lakeshore Marine Center charges $15 a foot on a one-year contract, or $18 month to month, for fully enclosed storage. For a 24-foot boat that is roughly $360 to $580 a month. A long-term wet slip at Fernandina Harbor, the city’s marina, is $25 a foot per month.

Storage lots cost less and ask more of you. RecNation’s lots publish web rates from about $171 a month for an uncovered 12-by-35 space in Yulee, and from $255 a month in Ponte Vedra Beach, and the rates move with demand. A lot near home also answers the HOA problem above without changing houses.

Then there is hurricane season. Florida law keeps a marina from ordering a boat out once a hurricane watch is issued, but a storage contract can let the marina move or secure a boat the owner has not removed, for a fee. St. Augustine’s city marina requires a hurricane plan on file for any boat staying between June 1 and November 1, and its harbormaster’s 2017 letter advises hauling out before a storm and arranging it early, because haul-out yards fill up. A dry stack answers much of that, since the boat is already out of the water, and the St. Augustine Shipyard describes its storage barn as Category 4 hurricane-rated. None of the private marinas publishes its storm plan online, so ask for the contract’s storm clause before you sign. Yachts and marinas: dockage, haul-outs and the hurricane rule →