United States · North America
Moving to Orlando
Orlando quick facts
United States at a glance
North America
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World Bank · 2025Religion
% of populationCIA World Factbook / national censuses
Cost of living in Orlando
Can you move to United States?
Pick your passport to see whether you can enter United States — and what it takes to stay.
Entry rules come from github.com/imorte/passport-index-data, updated 17 February 2026. They change without notice — confirm with the official immigration service before booking.
Getting set up in United States
Status, Social Security number and Florida's two arrival clocks
There is no post-arrival registration in the US: your I-94 record is your status. In the first weeks you need a Social Security number if work-authorised, or an ITIN if not. Florida then runs two clocks that start the day you establish residency — 10 days to title and register a vehicle, 30 days to get a Florida driver licence — and both are handled by county tax collector offices, which is not where newcomers look. Florida also requires private employers above a size threshold to use E-Verify, so work authorisation is checked more systematically here than in many states, and the state does not recognise certain out-of-state licences issued to people without lawful presence. None of that changes your federal status; all of it changes how often you are asked to evidence it.
Read the full step-by-step guide10 days to register, no-fault insurance, and a metro built on toll roads
Florida gives you 10 days from establishing residency to title and register a vehicle and 30 days to get a Florida licence, and both go through the county tax collector rather than a state DMV. Two things about driving here are genuinely different. Florida is a no-fault state whose statutory minimum insurance is $10,000 of Personal Injury Protection and $10,000 of Property Damage Liability with no bodily injury liability requirement, which means both that you are underinsured at the minimum and that many drivers around you carry nothing that would compensate you. And central Florida runs on tolled expressways with almost no cash lanes left, so a transponder is not optional. There is no emissions test in Florida and no safety inspection for private cars, which makes registration itself simpler than in California.
Read the full step-by-step guideOpening a bank account, building credit, and paying for a house you cannot insure cheaply
You can open a US account without a Social Security number: federal rules let a bank use your passport number and country of issuance, or an ITIN, as the identifying number. The credit problem is the standard American one. Two things are locally specific. A very large share of Orlando's employment is hourly, seasonal or tipped, so proving stable income to a landlord or a lender takes documentation rather than a salary figure. And if you buy, Florida's escrowed insurance and property tax can be a larger monthly line than in almost any other state — lenders escrow both, so a premium increase raises your mortgage payment mid-term without the rate changing at all.
Read the full step-by-step guideHealthCare.gov, a state that never expanded Medicaid, and two hospital systems
Coverage comes from an employer, from the federal marketplace at HealthCare.gov, or from Florida Medicaid if you fall inside its narrow eligibility. Florida never adopted the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, so adults without dependent children generally do not qualify however low their income — and below the subsidy floor there is a gap with no affordable option in it. The counterweight is that Florida has by some distance the largest ACA marketplace enrolment of any state, so the plan choice on HealthCare.gov here is unusually wide and heavily subsidised for many households. Locally, care is dominated by two large non-profit systems, AdventHealth and Orlando Health, and by the Lake Nona cluster that houses a children's hospital, a VA hospital and UCF's medical school on one campus.
Read the full step-by-step guideGetting a US phone number, and staying connected through a hurricane
The US has no SIM registration requirement, so getting connected is trivially easy: buy a prepaid SIM or eSIM and it works immediately. The friction is postpaid contracts, which run a credit check you cannot pass on arrival. What is local is storm resilience. Much of Orlando is served by the Orlando Utilities Commission, the city's own municipal electric and water utility, with Duke Energy covering surrounding areas — so which outage map you watch depends on your address. After a hurricane, restoration is measured in days rather than hours across a metro this large, and the household kit that matters is a power bank, a car charger and a plan for how you will hear an evacuation or boil-water notice without mains power.
Read the full step-by-step guideNo income tax at all, and a property insurance bill that takes the saving back
Florida has no personal income tax and its constitution bars one, which is a stronger guarantee than a state that merely chooses not to levy one — and there is no city or county income tax either, so unlike Columbus or Kansas City there is no work-city arithmetic to do. The state collects instead through consumption and property. Sales tax is 6% plus Orange County's 0.5% discretionary surtax, which applies only to the first $5,000 of any single item. Property is where the interesting rules live: a homestead exemption of $25,000 against all taxes plus a further $25,000 above $50,000 of assessed value against everything but school taxes, and the Save Our Homes cap limiting annual assessment growth on a homestead to 3% or CPI, whichever is lower — accumulated benefit portable up to $500,000 to your next Florida home. The catch that no tax table shows is insurance: Florida property premiums are the highest in the country and they claw back a large part of what the missing income tax saves.
Read the full step-by-step guideEach guide has verified costs, timelines, required documents, and the non-obvious gotchas — sourced from official government pages. Last verified August 2026.
Essential English phrases
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What to know before you go
Budget property insurance before you budget anything else
CriticalFlorida homeowners pay the highest property insurance premiums in the United States, and the structure is as important as the number. Named-storm damage carries a separate hurricane deductible expressed as a percentage of the insured value — commonly 2%, 5% or 10% — so a 5% deductible on a $400,000 house is $20,000 out of pocket before the policy responds. Flood is never included and must be bought separately. A dozen Florida insurers failed or withdrew between 2021 and 2023, pushing policies into Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the state-run insurer of last resort; the market has since been depopulating and rates have started to come down, but this is still the line that decides whether a Florida house is affordable. Get a real quote on the specific address before you make an offer, not after.
Two different clocks start the day you become a resident: 10 days and 30
CriticalFlorida gives you 10 days from establishing residency to title and register a vehicle, and 30 days to obtain a Florida driver licence. Registration requires Florida insurance from a Florida-licensed agent first, so the order is insurance, then registration, then licence — and the 10-day leg is the one people miss because they assume the licence deadline covers both. Both appointments run through the county tax collector's offices rather than a state DMV.
Florida's minimum car insurance does not include bodily injury liability
CriticalFlorida is a no-fault state. The statutory minimum is $10,000 of Personal Injury Protection and $10,000 of Property Damage Liability — and, unusually, no bodily injury liability at all for most drivers. That means the legal minimum leaves you personally exposed if you injure someone, and it means a large share of the drivers around you carry nothing that would pay you. Buy bodily injury liability and uninsured motorist cover well above the minimum. This is not the same conversation as in California or New York.
File for homestead exemption by 1 March, and ask about portability
CriticalIf you buy and make the house your permanent residence, the homestead exemption removes $25,000 of assessed value from all property taxes and a further $25,000 of value between $50,000 and $75,000 from everything except school taxes. More importantly it starts the Save Our Homes cap, which limits annual assessment growth to 3% or CPI, whichever is lower — a benefit that compounds enormously over a decade. You must be a permanent resident on 1 January and file with the county property appraiser by 1 March. If you already owned a Florida homestead, portability lets you carry up to $500,000 of accumulated benefit to the new one, provided you establish it by 1 January of the third year after leaving the old one.
You are 80 km inland, so the hazard is rain, not surge — and almost nobody insures for it
CriticalOrlando sits about 30 metres above sea level and well away from either coast, so storm surge is genuinely not your problem. Rainfall is. Hurricane Ian dropped more than 13 inches on Orlando International Airport in September 2022 and flooded neighbourhoods like Orlo Vista that had never been mapped as high risk, and at the time roughly 3% of Orange County single-family homes carried flood insurance. Flood is never part of a homeowner or renters' policy; it is a separate NFIP or private policy with a 30-day waiting period in most cases. Check the address on FEMA's flood maps, then buy the policy anyway if you are anywhere near a lake or a low-lying street.
Get a toll transponder in week one
ImportantCentral Florida is built on toll roads — the 408, 417, 429, the Turnpike — and most of them have no cash lanes left. Without an E-PASS or SunPass transponder the cameras bill the registered owner by post at a higher rate plus an administrative fee, and rental cars add their own daily charge on top. E-PASS is the Central Florida Expressway Authority's, SunPass is the state's, and they interoperate. Order one before your first drive to the airport.
Top industries & employers
Theme parks, hospitality & conventions
Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando (Epic Universe opened May 2025), SeaWorld, Orange County Convention Center, Marriott Vacations Worldwide, Hilton Grand Vacations
Walt Disney World employs around 77,000 people and is the largest single-site employer in the United States; Universal opened an entire fourth park in May 2025. The Orange County Convention Center is one of the largest in the country. The concentration is even heavier than Anaheim's — and 2020 showed exactly how a metro built on it behaves when the parks close.
Modelling, simulation & training
Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, Leidos, CAE USA, the Team Orlando cluster at Central Florida Research Park
Orlando's least-known and best-paid sector. The US military's simulation and training procurement commands sit together at Central Florida Research Park beside UCF, and the contractor cluster grew up around them. It is the reason a theme-park city has a serious engineering job market, and it is largely closed to non-citizens because of clearance requirements.
Health care & life sciences
AdventHealth, Orlando Health, Nemours Children's Hospital, Orlando VA Medical Center, UCF College of Medicine, the Lake Nona Medical City cluster
The metro's two big hospital systems each employ tens of thousands and are the most reliable hiring in the region when tourism turns. Lake Nona's Medical City assembled a medical school, a children's hospital, a VA hospital and research institutes on one site in under twenty years.
Aerospace & space
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Siemens Energy's Orlando gas turbine operations, the Space Coast supply chain an hour east
Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center are an hour's drive east, and the supply chain and workforce spill into the Orlando metro. Siemens Energy runs a large gas turbine engineering and manufacturing operation in Orlando that has nothing to do with tourism at all.
Higher education & research
University of Central Florida, Valencia College, Rollins College (Winter Park), Full Sail University
UCF is one of the largest universities in the United States by enrolment and sits next to the research park, which is why the simulation and optics clusters are here. Its optics and photonics college (CREOL) anchors a genuine specialist industry.
Logistics, construction & professional services
Amazon fulfilment operations, Darden Restaurants (headquartered in Orlando), the I-4 corridor distribution market, a very large residential construction sector
Central Florida is one of the fastest-growing metros in the country, and construction and distribution have grown with it. Darden — Olive Garden, LongHorn and others — is a genuine Fortune 500 headquarters in the city, which is rarer here than the metro's size suggests.
Where to go in Orlando
Mills 50 (ViMi)
Food · Mills Avenue and Colonial Drive, just north-east of downtown
The centre of one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the American South, layered with a decade of independent bars, coffee shops and murals — bánh mì counters and third-wave espresso on the same block.
Local tip: Go on a weekday evening. The Vietnamese restaurants along Colonial are the reason the district exists and are still the best thing in it; the newer bars are the reason people stay past ten.
Lake Eola Park
Nature · Downtown Orlando
The city's front garden, built around a lake that is itself a water-filled sinkhole, with a 1.5 km path, the swan boats, and the downtown skyline reflected in it.
Local tip: Sunday morning farmers market, then a lap of the lake before the heat. The Fourth of July and New Year fireworks here are the closest thing Orlando has to a civic gathering that has nothing to do with the parks.
Winter Park and the Morse Museum
Hidden gemCulture · Winter Park, immediately north of Orlando
A separate small city of brick streets, live oaks and a chain of lakes, with Park Avenue's shops and the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum holding the world's most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany's work — including the recovered chapel interior from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
Local tip: Take the Scenic Boat Tour through the lake chain's canals first, then the museum. It is the single strongest argument that central Florida has a cultural life independent of the attractions.
Wekiwa Springs State Park
Nature · Apopka, about 30 minutes north-west
A first-magnitude spring that pushes out water at a constant 22°C year-round into a swimming basin and a blackwater river, inside a park of sandhill and hammock forest.
Local tip: Arrive before 10am on a summer weekend or the park closes at capacity. Rent a canoe and paddle upriver rather than swimming in the crowded basin — the wildlife is on the water, not in the pool.
Audubon Park Garden District and the Milk District
Neighborhood · East of downtown, either side of Colonial
Two adjacent 1950s neighbourhoods that became the city's independent retail and food centres — a weekly community market, record shops, breweries and the East End Market food hall.
Local tip: The Monday evening market at East End Market is where Orlando looks least like a tourist destination and most like a normal southern city with a good food scene.
Dr. Phillips and Restaurant Row
Food · Sand Lake Road, south-west Orlando
A three-kilometre stretch of Sand Lake Road between the attractions and the suburbs that quietly became the metro's fine-dining strip, built on the expense accounts of forty million annual visitors.
Local tip: It is the best-value serious cooking in the city precisely because it is subsidised by convention traffic. Book midweek; conference season fills it solid.
Emergency numbers in Orlando
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