Tourism Builds and Supports Florida Communities

You may not realize how much tourism impacts your daily life. The record-breaking number of visitors who come to Florida each year improve your quality of life and provide significant value to all of our lives, even if we aren’t directly involved in the tourism industry.

Out-of-state visitors alone generated nearly $5.5 billion in local tax revenue in 2016. Those dollars are used by counties to fund our schools, keep our communities safe, build and maintain infrastructure projects, protect the environment, keep our beaches and parks thriving and support area arts and culture.The volume of visitors to our state each year also help provide us with more options including more restaurants, more shops and more flights when traveling by air for business or pleasure.

Not only do these dollars contribute to county residents’ quality of life, they also lessen their tax burden. When visitors are spending money in our counties and generated tax revenue, that means less money locals will have to pay for taxes. On average, tourism helps Florida families save more than $1,500 each year in taxes.

Speaking of taxes, one of the biggest benefits tourism provides Floridians, is no state income tax. Thanks to the state tax revenue generated by tourism, Florida doesn’t need to levy a state income tax on its residents. 

Not only does tourism build and support Florida’s local communities, it offers huge benefits to the state. One of the biggest of which is it puts 1.4 million of our fellow Floridians to work. The tourism industry offers more employment opportunities to Floridians than any other industry in the state. Also, tourism accounts for $3 billion in total sales tax collections for the state.

Thanks to tourism, our quality of life is better, our communities stronger, friends and family have jobs and all of us are able to keep more money in our pockets. That is the value of tourism to each Floridian and the reason why we need to keep promoting Florida to potential visitors and keep them coming back to the Sunshine State.