Hurricanes in South Florida: How Often They Hit Miami, the Keys, and the Palm Beaches: Every hurricane within 50 nautical miles of Miami, Homestead, Key West, and West Palm Beach since 1900, and what the record says about the odds

Hurricanes in South Florida come more often than almost anywhere else on the U.S. coast, and the record since 1900 says how often with a precision most people never see. Ask around Miami and you will hear "every few years" or "not since Wilma," and both are true. Neither is the number.

This article gives the numbers, city by city, from our analysis of the complete NOAA hurricane record through the 2025 season. It covers how many hurricanes have passed within 50 nautical miles of Miami, Homestead, Key West, Naples, and West Palm Beach, how many of them were major hurricanes, how often two arrived in the same season, and how South Florida honestly ranks against the Outer Banks and Louisiana. It ends with what a homeowner can do with the information, because a hurricane count is only useful if it changes a decision.

How often hurricanes hit South Florida, city by city

The standard way to measure hurricane exposure at a place is the one the National Hurricane Center uses for its own return-period maps: count the hurricanes whose center passed within 50 nautical miles (about 57 statute miles) of the point. That radius is roughly the average reach of hurricane-force winds, so a storm inside it usually means hurricane conditions somewhere in your area, though not necessarily at your house.

Here is that count for the South Florida places in our study, on the record from 1900 through 2025, alongside two stricter measures: how many of those storms were major hurricanes (Category 3 or stronger) when they passed, and how many hurricane-strength coastline crossings happened within the same 50-mile circle.

Two things stand out. First, the whole southeast coast from Homestead to West Palm Beach sits in a narrow band, 27 to 28 hurricanes in 126 seasons. There is no safe town in that stretch and no especially exposed one; the differences are one storm at the edge of a circle. Second, the crossing column separates the places. Florida City and Homestead sit within 50 nautical miles of 23 hurricane-strength coastline crossings, one every 5.5 years on average, more than any other community on the U.S. Gulf or Atlantic coast. Miami's 17 and West Palm Beach's 13 are lower because storms that cross the coast near Homestead often pass Miami with their center just offshore or just inland, and because Palm Beach County catches storms that came ashore farther south.

The average interval is exactly that, an average over 126 seasons. It is not a schedule and not a forecast. Miami's 28 storms did not arrive every 4.5 years; they arrived in 22 seasons, sometimes two at a time, with gaps as long as twenty years between them. Both of those facts matter more to a homeowner than the average, and both get their own section below.

Where South Florida ranks: the honest version

You will read that Miami, or Homestead, or Monroe County is the most hurricane-prone place in the United States. Each version comes from a real study, and each is true under one way of counting. Our study counted three ways across the entire coast at 33,916 points, and then tested how sure the ranking is by re-running the analysis thousands of times on reshuffled seasons and on storm positions nudged by the amount early records were actually uncertain. The result is a ranking with confidence attached, which is rarer than it should be.

• Hurricane coastline crossings. South Florida is the most probable leader. The peak neighborhood, in the Florida Bay and Everglades sector, has 26 crossings within 50 nautical miles since 1900; southeast Louisiana follows with 20. South Florida holds the top spot in 69 percent of resamples when seasons are reshuffled, and 45 percent when old storm positions are also allowed to be as imprecise as they were, against 28 percent for Louisiana. It leads, but the two are closer than the raw counts suggest, and anyone who tells you one town is the hurricane capital is quoting a precision the record does not have.
• Major hurricanes passing nearby. Here South Florida leads clearly. The best-scoring neighborhood in south and southwest Florida has had 15 major-hurricane centers within 50 nautical miles since 1900, one every 8.4 years, and the region from the Keys to the Everglades holds the major-hurricane maximum in 96 percent of resamples. This is the measure on which South Florida is unambiguously first.
• Hurricanes of any strength passing nearby. Here the Outer Banks of North Carolina lead: 35 within 50 nautical miles of Cape Hatteras since 1900, one every 3.6 years, against 29 for the best South Florida neighborhood. The Outer Banks jut into the corridor where storms curve back out to sea, so hurricanes that graze, stall offshore, or exit the coast all count there. Cape Hatteras leads that ranking in 63 percent of resamples.

So the accurate sentence is this: South Florida is the most probable leader for hurricane landfalls, the clear leader for major hurricanes, and second for hurricanes passing nearby. No single place holds every title. That has been the finding of every study since Simpson and Lawrence's 1971 NOAA count by coastal segment, through Elsner and Kara's 1997 county study (the source of the "Monroe County, once every four years" figure), to Keim, Muller, and Stone's 2007 paper in the Journal of Climate that named south Florida, the Outer Banks, and the north-central Gulf Coast the three focal points of U.S. hurricane activity. Our count on the record through 2025 lands in the same place. If you want the whole comparison, including why our raw counts run about 25 percent shorter than NHC's modeled return periods while ranking places the same way, it is on the research page.

The last hurricane to hit Miami, and the twenty seasons since

The last hurricane center to pass within 50 nautical miles of Miami was Wilma, on October 24, 2005, two months after Katrina came ashore near the Miami-Dade and Broward line as a Category 1 on its way to the Gulf.

Since then, nothing. Irma in 2017 brought tropical-storm-force sustained winds and hurricane-force gusts to the metro and knocked out power for days, but its center stayed well over 50 nautical miles to the west, crossing the Lower Keys and coming ashore again near Marco Island. By the standard measure, the 20 seasons from 2006 through 2025 are the longest stretch without a hurricane near Miami in the record since 1900. The previous longest was 14 seasons, from 1910 to 1923, and it ended with the 1924 storm followed two years later by the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926.

That history is worth knowing for two opposite reasons. The first is that long gaps are a normal feature of Miami's record: 13 seasons from 1951 to 1963, 12 from 1967 to 1978, then Cleo and Isbell in one season, Betsy the next, Inez the one after. Hurricanes do not arrive on a schedule, and a two-decade gap is not evidence that anything has changed about the coast. The second reason is the mirror image, and it is the one that matters if you are deciding whether to protect your home. A gap does not make the next storm more likely either. There is no "overdue." Storms have no memory of the last one, and the odds for next season are the odds the historical rate gives: at least one hurricane center within 50 nautical miles of Miami in 22 of the last 126 seasons, roughly one season in six, and a major hurricane within that circle in about one season in ten. Those odds were the same in 2004, when the last quiet stretch ended, and they were the same in 1992, when Andrew arrived after five quiet seasons.

The practical version: the length of the current gap tells you nothing about next year, but it does tell you something about your neighbors. A large share of the homes and the homeowners in Miami-Dade and Broward have never been through a hurricane here. If you bought after 2005, your house may have been sold to you as "hurricane-tested" by people who meant Wilma, and Wilma was a Category 2 in the metro. The homes that came through Andrew were tested by something else entirely.

Two in one season: South Florida's clustered hurricane years

This is the part of the record with the most direct meaning for anyone who lives here, and it is the part our study spent the most effort on. A hurricane counts once at a place, but a season can bring more than one, and the two do not line up the same way everywhere on the coast.

Cape Hatteras has seen 32 hurricanes pass within 50 nautical miles since 1900, spread across 31 separate seasons: almost never two in one year. Miami has seen 28, arriving in only 22 seasons. Six of those seasons brought two: 1906, 1926, 1935, 1947, 1964 (Cleo in August and Isbell in October), and 2005 (Katrina in August and Wilma in October). Florida City had a three-hurricane season in 1935, the year of the Labor Day storm. West Palm Beach has had eight two-hurricane seasons, including 2004, when Frances and Jeanne came ashore at almost the same point on Hutchinson Island three weeks apart, and 2005 again. Key West had Katrina and Rita pass within 50 nautical miles as hurricanes in the space of a month in 2005.

The statistics say this is not a coincidence. South Florida's annual hurricane counts are more clustered than a random process would produce, a pattern the published record for Florida has shown before, and across the state roughly four in ten seasons that had one hurricane landfall had another. The Outer Banks, with more hurricanes overall, do not show it. Whatever the reason, and steering patterns that persist through a season are the usual suspect, the consequence for you is concrete.

A place whose hurricanes come in pairs faces a different planning problem than a place whose hurricanes come one at a time. Recovery from the first storm can be interrupted by the second inside the same season, and the real demand on shelters, insurers, and repair crews is set by the multi-storm season, not by the average interval between storms. Miami's "one every 4.5 years" understates that demand in a way Cape Hatteras's "one every 3.9 years" does not. Anyone who lived through 2004 in Palm Beach County, with blue tarps from Frances still on roofs when Jeanne arrived, or through 2005 in Miami-Dade and Broward, with Katrina's debris barely cleared before Wilma, knows exactly what that means. Materials and crews were spoken for. Openings that were plywood for the first storm were plywood for the second, or nothing at all.

Major hurricanes: where the strongest storms have passed

The count that separates South Florida from everywhere else is the major hurricane count. Since 1900, 13 major-hurricane centers have passed within 50 nautical miles of Miami and 14 within 50 nautical miles of Florida City. Cape Hatteras, with more hurricanes of any strength, has had 5. Galveston has had 6, New Orleans 7, and Houma, in the heart of southeast Louisiana's landfall belt, 8. Nowhere else on the coast is in South Florida's range: Key West and Naples, at 12 each, are the only places close, and they are South Florida too.

The names are familiar. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, which crossed the city as a Category 4 and remains, adjusted for today's development, the costliest storm in U.S. history by most estimates. The 1935 Labor Day hurricane, still the most intense landfall ever recorded in the United States, which crossed the Upper Keys within 50 nautical miles of Florida City. The 1947 Fort Lauderdale hurricane, King in 1950, Betsy in 1965, and Andrew in 1992, the Category 5 that flattened Homestead and Florida City and rewrote the building code. Wilma in 2005 came ashore near Cape Romano as a major hurricane, crossed the peninsula in under five hours, and brought Category 1 to 2 conditions to Miami-Dade and Broward as its center passed to the north.

Part of the reason South Florida collects major hurricanes while the Outer Banks collect hurricanes of any strength is geography, and it will not change. Storms that reach South Florida at the peak of the season have usually crossed the warmest water in the basin near the peak of their strength; many of the storms that pass Cape Hatteras are already curving north or out to sea, and a good share are past their peak. The Outer Banks are the frequency maximum, South Florida the intensity maximum, and building codes on each coast reflect exactly that: Miami-Dade and Broward are the only counties in the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone.

What the numbers mean if you own a home here

A few honest limits first. Everything above measures where hurricane conditions have occurred and how often. It does not measure risk. Risk is exposure combined with what is in the way and how well it is built, and a frequently hit, well-built neighborhood can fare better in a given storm than a rarely hit, vulnerable one. Our study keeps those layers separate on purpose, and so should you: the count tells you the hazard, not your outcome.

With that said, three things follow directly from the record.

Plan on the rate, not the gap. The historical odds for your area are the planning number, whether the last storm was last year or twenty years ago. For the southeast coast that means roughly one season in six with a hurricane center within 50 nautical miles and about one in ten with a major hurricane. Over a 30-year mortgage, at least one is close to certain.

Plan for two. If your protection depends on something you have to buy, schedule, or install between the warning and the storm, the second storm of a season is when that fails. Permanent opening protection, whether impact windows and doors or properly rated shutters, is the one part of your plan that is exactly as ready for the second storm as the first, and it is the part that Palm Beach County in September 2004 could not buy at any price. Insurers price this: opening protection is one of the two features, with the roof, that drives Florida wind-mitigation credits.

Know your county. The southeast coast is one band on the map, but the rules differ. Miami-Dade and Broward are in the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone with its own product approvals and design pressures; Palm Beach County sits just outside it under wind-borne debris rules that are strict but different; the Keys sit under the highest design wind speeds in the state, up to 190 mph, with open-water exposure on nearly every side. If you are not sure what your openings are rated for, a wind-mitigation inspection tells you, and it may qualify you for a state grant that pays for most of the fix.

Next Steps

1. Read the full study, including how South Florida compares with the rest of the coast and how sure the ranking is, on our research page.
2. Find out what your openings are actually rated for. A wind-mitigation inspection is the fastest way, and the My Safe Florida Home program can pay for the inspection and much of the work.
3. If your plan for the second storm of a season is the same as your plan for the first, you are in good shape. If it depends on plywood, crews, or shutters you have not bought, request a free estimate for permanent opening protection.
4. Check what your county requires: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, or the Keys.
5. If cost is the obstacle, financing options and the state grant together cover most South Florida projects.