Florida or Arizona? The retirement ledger, honestly kept.

Start with the concession. Arizona’s property taxes are genuinely low: roughly 0.48% effective on average, with a Senior Freeze program that lets qualifying homeowners 65 and older freeze their assessed value. Here in St. Johns County our 2025 effective rate runs about 1.60% (Duval about 1.96%) — a real gap on a real bill, and any Florida agent who skips past it is selling, not advising. Arizona also exempts Social Security and, since January 2023, taxes income at a flat 2.5%, one of the lowest rates of any state that taxes income at all.

What Florida wins back: the income line goes to zero here, on everything — IRA and 401(k) withdrawals, pensions, capital gains from the business or the brokerage account. For retirees drawing modest fixed income, Arizona’s 2.5% costs little and its property-tax edge may genuinely win the ledger. For retirees with large withdrawals, a liquidity event, or serious portfolio income, Florida’s zero usually swamps the property-tax gap. Florida also compounds differently over time: the Save Our Homes cap holds a homesteaded assessment to 3% annual growth no matter what the market does. This is arithmetic, not allegiance — and I run it per household, because the answer honestly flips depending on your income shape. The Florida tax math for movers, in full →

Florida’s risk column is the one you already know: hurricane season runs June through November, and the state’s homeowners-insurance market has spent years under real stress — premiums here deserve a quote, not an estimate, before you commit to any coastal home. The honest local nuance is that Northeast Florida is not South Florida: this corner has a milder modern storm history than the peninsula’s south, and every listing on this site shows its flood and evacuation zone precisely because the risk is parcel-level, not state-level. Budget for insurance honestly and the risk is manageable; ignore it and it finds you.

Arizona’s risk column is quieter and longer: water. The federal Bureau of Reclamation declared a Tier 1 shortage on the Colorado River for 2026, with Arizona absorbing a 320,000 acre-foot reduction plus additional drought-plan contributions, and the rules governing the river after 2026 are being renegotiated now. That does not mean taps run dry in Sun City — municipal supplies are the last to be cut — but it is a structural, decades-scale question priced into the region’s future, alongside summers whose extreme-heat stretches are their own lifestyle fact. Neither state offers a risk-free retirement. The adult move is picking the risk you understand and insure best.

The communities themselves rhyme: Del Webb invented the Sun City model in Arizona, and the same brand now operates six communities in Northeast Florida, so the clubhouse-and-pickleball layer of life transfers almost exactly. What differs is everything around it. Arizona offers desert light, dry air, mountain horizons, and golf twelve months a year with summers organized around air conditioning and dawn tee times. This coast offers the ocean itself, green towns, a major metro’s hospitals and airport within half an hour, and summers organized around humidity and afternoon storms.

The grandkid math is worth naming too: flight access matters more in retirement than most people project, and which state wins depends entirely on where your family actually lives — for East Coast families, Jacksonville is usually the shorter trip; for West Coast families, Phoenix is. If your search is genuinely two-state, use professionals in both markets: for Arizona, the Christie’s International Real Estate network — the same global network this brokerage belongs to — maintains its Arizona presence through the Phoenix office directory at christiesrealestate.com, and I am glad to make that a warm handoff rather than a cold search. Every Del Webb near Jacksonville, compared straight →