FLORIDA · THE COMPARISON · MIAMI VS KEY WEST
Both sit on the same warm Atlantic edge, and both get sold with the same photograph: pastel paint, water the color of a swimming pool, a sunset with an audience. On the ground they run at different speeds. Miami is a county of separate governments (the City of Miami, Miami Beach and Coral Gables are three cities, not three neighborhoods). Key West is one island at the end of US-1, where Mile Marker 0 stands at the corner of Whitehead and Fleming.
The choice usually gets made on weather, and weather is exactly where the two are closest: 76.2°F against 75.8°F for the average January high. What actually separates them is the nights, the June rain, the tax rate on your room, and how much of each place you can reach without a car.
THE COMPARISON AT A GLANCE · MIAMI VS KEY WEST
Miami takes the first South Florida trip on access and range. Key West is the right answer when you want a flat island covered on foot and a 70-mile boat ride to Dry Tortugas.
SAME RAIN THRESHOLD: 0.10 IN · MIAMI-DADE 6.0% VS MONROE 5.0% · ABOUT 155 ROAD MILES APART
Go for: Miami if you want museums, neighborhoods and a beach reachable on a $2.25 fare; Key West if you want one walkable island, the reef boats and a nightly sunset ritual.
Think twice before: driving down for two nights. The road from Miami runs about 155 miles and close to 3 hours 40 minutes each way, and parking on the island is metered at $3.00 an hour.
Climate: NOAA NCEI stations USW00012839 and USW00012836 · Taxes: Florida Dept. of Revenue DR-15TDT · full sources at the end
On this page
- Miami or Key West for a first visitThe answer, and who should ignore it
- Monthly temperature and rain for bothTwelve months, two stations
- Where these weather figures come fromStation normals, month by month
- Spring break measures and cruise ship limits$548 tows, SB 1194
- Tourist tax, tickets and parking6.0% vs 5.0%, Vizcaya $20, Hemingway $19
- Things to do in eachWynwood and PAMM against Mallory Square and Dry Tortugas
- Best month for eachJune, 10.51 inches against 4.23
Two pillars carry the detail, each with month pages behind it: Miami and Key West. For the wider state calendar, the best time to visit Florida sets the dry season at November through April. Figures below come from the two airport gauges, the Florida Department of Revenue and each city’s own parking and museum pages.
Miami or Key West
Miami, for most first trips. The airport sits about 12 miles from South Beach, 20 to 45 minutes depending on traffic. The Metromover through Downtown and Brickell is free, the Miami Beach trolley is free from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Metrorail and Metrobus charge a flat $2.25 a ride with the day capped at $5.65. You can land, reach the sand at Lummus Park (free, lifeguarded, open around the clock) and never sign a rental agreement.
Key West suits a narrower brief, and suits it better than Miami ever will. Walkers get the largest wooden historic district in North America on a flat island, plus a free Duval Loop bus calling at 18 stops through Old Town. Divers and boat people get Dry Tortugas, 70 miles west, with no road or bridge to it. Couples get the Mallory Square Sunset Celebration, run every night of the year, weather permitting. The price of all that is the arrival: about 155 miles and close to 3 hours 40 minutes from Miami by road, or a flight into EYW.
Weather is the belief that does the least work here. January highs land within half a degree, 76.2°F in Miami against 75.8°F in Key West, and the rain-day counts sit at 3.8 and 3.3. Hurricane season is one season for both, June 1 to November 30, peaking around September 10. Anyone picking between them for winter sun is picking between two versions of the same afternoon.
Check one thing before you book: your dates, against two calendars. Miami Beach publishes its spring-break traffic and parking measures each winter, and March in South Beach runs by them. The Dry Tortugas ferry, the Yankee Freedom III, leaves at 8 a.m. with check-in before 7:30 and sells out weeks ahead, so a Key West trip built around that boat starts with the boat seat and finds the hotel afterward.
Miami vs Key West weather: temperature, rain and sea
| Month | Miami high / low | Miami days ≥ 0.10 in | Key West high / low | Key West days ≥ 0.10 in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 76.2 / 61.0°F | 3.8 | 75.8 / 65.5°F | 3.3 |
| February | 78.2 / 63.2°F | 3.6 | 77.4 / 67.1°F | 2.4 |
| March | 80.6 / 65.6°F | 3.5 | 79.6 / 69.3°F | 2.9 |
| April | 83.6 / 69.8°F | 4.3 | 82.6 / 73.1°F | 2.8 |
| May | 86.7 / 73.4°F | 6.9 | 85.9 / 76.4°F | 4.1 |
| June | 89.3 / 76.3°F | 12.6 | 88.7 / 79.4°F | 6.4 |
| July | 90.6 / 77.5°F | 11.1 | 90.2 / 80.6°F | 6.8 |
| August | 90.7 / 77.7°F | 13.3 | 90.6 / 80.5°F | 9.1 |
| September | 89.0 / 76.9°F | 13.1 | 89.0 / 79.2°F | 10.2 |
| October | 85.9 / 74.2°F | 9.0 | 85.8 / 76.8°F | 7.6 |
| November | 81.3 / 68.3°F | 4.7 | 81.0 / 72.2°F | 3.0 |
| December | 78.2 / 64.3°F | 3.7 | 77.7 / 68.3°F | 3.1 |
Both places run the same annual shape, mild and dry from November through April, hot and wet from May through October, and yet the wettest single month is not the same one: 10.51 inches at the Miami gauge in June, 7.24 inches at the Key West gauge in September.
By day, the two are twins. Miami’s average January high is 76.2°F, Key West’s 75.8°F; in July it is 90.6°F against 90.2°F. The gap lives at night, and it favors the island. January averages a low of 65.5°F in Key West against 61.0°F in Miami, a difference of 4.5 degrees, the widest of the year. By July it has narrowed to about three degrees (80.6°F against 77.5°F) and it never quite closes.
Sea figures come from one method on both sides, the mean of daily maxima over 2015 to 2024, which reads a shade warmer than a 24-hour mean. They cross during the year. Miami shows 77.0°F in January against Key West’s 76.5°F, then Key West pulls ahead from May (84.6°F against 83.0°F) and stays ahead through the fall. For a swimmer in February the two are the same bath, 76.9°F and 76.3°F, and both are warmer than most visitors expect a winter ocean to be.
Miami and Key West weather averages: monthly temperature and rainfall
Miami’s normals are read at NOAA station USW00012839, the gauge at Miami International Airport, roughly 12 miles inland from the sand at South Beach. Key West’s come from USW00012836, at Key West International Airport, on the island itself, minutes from Old Town. On an island that small the gauge and the seafront breathe the same air; a mainland gauge a dozen miles from the beach does not always. Neither station’s elevation appears in the normals file we read, so no altitude correction sits behind either column.
The rain-day threshold is identical on both sides, at least 0.10 inch in a calendar day, which is why those two counts can be set against each other without adjustment: 3.8 days in a Miami January against 3.3 in Key West, 12.6 against 6.4 in June. The heavier threshold, an inch or more, is published for both as well, and in January it splits them not at all, at 0.4 days each.
Spring break and cruise ship rules in Miami and Key West
Miami Beach writes a dated, numbered plan for the one month that needs one. For spring break 2026 the city set flat rates of $40 to $100 at the four Art Deco District garages between 5th and 16th streets, from Washington Avenue to Ocean Drive, and doubled the non-resident towing rate to $548 plus administrative fees. Police run a traffic plan from 6 p.m. each Thursday through Sunday around South of Fifth and Flamingo Park, with garage and lot closures, restricted beach access and DUI checkpoints. No blanket curfew applies, and beaches do not close at 6 p.m.: a curfew arrives only if the police chief judges that incidents require one.
On the Key West side, the published rule we found points at ships rather than at visitors. In November 2020 voters approved three limits on cruise traffic: 1,500 disembarking passengers a day, no ship carrying more than 1,300 people, and docking priority for the best environmental and health records. Governor Ron DeSantis then signed SB 1194, under which a local ballot initiative may not restrict maritime commerce in a Florida port, written to apply retroactively to those votes. We found no equivalent seasonal traffic or towing plan published for Key West, which is a gap in our sources rather than a statement about what the city does.
For one ordinary day, all of that decides where the car sleeps. A car left outside a garage in South Beach after 6 p.m. on a March Thursday is a car inside a traffic plan, towed at the non-resident rate. In Key West the car costs money instead of trouble: meters at $3.00 an hour, the Old Town Parking Garage at $6 an hour or $48 a day plus tax, the Mallory Square lot at $7 an hour or $48 a day with a ten-hour maximum. Park it once and walk, or ride the free Duval Loop.
Tourist tax and ticket prices in Miami and Key West
| Line | Miami | Key West |
|---|---|---|
| County transient rental tax | 6.0% (Miami-Dade) | 5.0% (Monroe) |
| State sales tax on the same bill | 6% | 6% |
| Free ride in town | Metromover, Downtown and Brickell | Duval Loop, 18 stops in Old Town |
| One landmark ticket, adult | Vizcaya $20 (usually $25) | Hemingway Home $19 |
| Beach entry | Lummus Park, free | Fort Zachary Taylor, $6 per vehicle or $2.50 on foot |
| Parking, hourly | South Pointe Park lot from $2 | Street meters $3.00 |
Miami-Dade levies a 6.0% transient rental tax and Monroe County 5.0%, each filed and paid alongside the 6% state sales tax, so the line at the bottom of the folio is 12% against 11%. No per-night ceiling appears for either county on form DR-15TDT: both are straight percentages of the rate, which is what decides the total on a five-night stay far more than the single point between them.
On tickets, the named ones price out close. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens charges $20 for adults while restoration work is underway, down from $25, with children 6 to 12 at $5 and under-sixes free, open Wednesday to Monday and closed Tuesdays. The Pérez Art Museum Miami is free from 5 to 9 p.m. every Thursday and all day on the second Saturday of the month. In Key West, the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum is $19 for adults and $7 for children, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Fort Zachary Taylor asks $6 per vehicle for up to eight people plus 50 cents a head, or $2.50 on foot. The Yankee Freedom III to Dry Tortugas runs about $250 for adults in 2026, park fee, snorkeling gear and two meals included.
Neither set of sources carries a series of nightly hotel rates, so ranking the two on room price would be guesswork. What we do have on one side only: Miami Beach hotels commonly add a nightly resort fee, with published amounts diverging sharply, from an average near $25 to a $35 to $95 band depending on the property. No equivalent resort-fee figure turned up for Key West, and that is an absence in our sources, not evidence that the practice stops at Florida City.
Things to do in Miami vs Key West
Miami has the indoor days. Vizcaya stands in north Coconut Grove above Biscayne Bay, with a Metrorail station a few minutes’ walk away. The Pérez Art Museum has its free evening every Thursday. Wynwood and Little Havana are mainland neighborhoods inside the City of Miami, reached on the same $2.25 fare, and the Beach MAX bus crosses the causeway to Collins Avenue for the same price. Everglades National Park is the day trip nobody in Key West can make on a whim, at $35 per vehicle for seven days.
Key West has the end of the road, literally: Mile Marker 0 is the southern terminus of a route running roughly 2,370 miles north to Fort Kent, Maine. Old Town is walked or cycled, not driven. Fort Zachary Taylor holds the beach most locals name first, open 8 a.m. to sundown with the fort itself closing at 5 p.m. Dry Tortugas is reachable only by ferry or seaplane. And key lime pie, born on this island in the late nineteenth century on sweetened condensed milk, has been Florida’s official pie since 2006.
Miami or Key West by month: best time to visit each
June splits them harder than any other month. Miami’s gauge reads 10.51 inches across 12.6 rain days, the wettest month of its year. Key West reads 4.23 inches across 6.4 days, with its own wet peak still three months away in September. Highs sit within a degree of each other (89.3°F and 88.7°F), so the same week can mean an afternoon-storm fortnight on the mainland and a dry one at the end of the road. Miami in June has the full month, and the Key West pillar carries the island’s calendar.
The last word
Decide on the car, not on the photographs: the trip that never rents one belongs in Miami, the trip that accepts four hours of bridges belongs in Key West. And if the island wins, know one thing before you set off, because it disappoints people every week: there is no safe place to stop on the Seven Mile Bridge. The photograph everyone wants is taken from the old bridge alongside, where a restored two-mile span is open to walkers and cyclists, with a parking area at the Marathon end and Pigeon Key sitting out in the middle of it.
Sources & data for this guide
- Miami monthly normals 1991-2020 · NOAA NCEI station USW00012839, Miami International Airport · checked Sep 11, 2026
- Key West monthly normals 1991-2020 · NOAA NCEI station USW00012836, Key West International Airport · checked Sep 11, 2026
- Sea surface, mean of daily maxima 2015-2024, both cities · Open-Meteo Marine API · checked Sep 11, 2026
- Hurricane season dates and September 10 peak · NOAA National Hurricane Center · checked Sep 11, 2026
- Transient rental taxes, Miami-Dade 6.0% and Monroe 5.0% · Florida Department of Revenue, form DR-15TDT · checked Sep 11, 2026
- Spring break 2026 garages, $548 non-resident tow, traffic plan and curfew position · City of Miami Beach, relayed by NBC 6, CBS News Miami and WLRN · checked Sep 11, 2026
- November 2020 cruise referendum and SB 1194 · Seatrade Cruise and Florida Politics · checked Sep 11, 2026
- Tickets: Vizcaya, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Hemingway Home, Fort Zachary Taylor, Yankee Freedom III · operators’ own pages · checked Sep 11, 2026
- Parking rates and free transit · City of Key West Parking Department, Miami-Dade Transit, City of Miami Beach · checked Sep 11, 2026 · rates change
- Our gaps, stated: no elevation figure for either weather station, no resort-fee figure for Key West, and published hours differ between sources for both the Metromover and the Duval Loop · verify on the spot.