Travel & Lifestyle
South Beach in Miami is Florida’s most Instagrammable stretch of sand, according to a new analysis that counted Instagram posts for the country’s best-known beaches and divided each total by the beach’s length in meters. South Beach racked up 8,255,624 posts across 5,061 meters, working out to 1,631 posts for every meter of sand—good enough for third place nationally, behind only Laguna Beach, California (2,292 posts per meter) and Waikiki, Hawaii (1,862 posts per meter).
- The research comes from spa pool manufacturer Hot Spring Spas NZ, which pulled Instagram hashtag counts for a seed list of well-known beaches in every state and cross-referenced them against beach lengths from OpenStreetMap and published data. Any beach with fewer than 10,000 posts was dropped from the list.
Where Pensacola Beach Lands
In Florida Panhandle, Pensacola Beach came in at third in Florida and 30th nationally, with 814,019 Instagram posts generating 63 posts per meter of sand—ahead of St Pete Beach, Fort Lauderdale Beach, Daytona Beach, Cocoa Beach, Key West, Naples Beach and Destin.
- Pensacola Beach outposts Fort Lauderdale Beach on a per-meter basis, despite Fort Lauderdale’s far bigger tourism footprint.
Florida’s Top 10 Instagrammable Beaches
| US rank | Rank in Florida | Beach | Instagram posts | Posts per meter |
| 3 | 1 | South Beach | 8,255,624 | 1,631 |
| 16 | 2 | Clearwater Beach | 1,402,734 | 227 |
| 30 | 3 | Pensacola Beach | 814,019 | 63 |
| 31 | 4 | St Pete Beach | 677,200 | 62 |
| 34 | 5 | Fort Lauderdale Beach | 664,588 | 60 |
| 42 | 6 | Daytona Beach | 1,637,451 | 44 |
| 64 | 7 | Cocoa Beach | 896,131 | 29 |
| 67 | 8 | Key West | 19,711 | 25 |
| 90 | 9 | Naples Beach | 163,736 | 10 |
| 111 | 10 | Destin | 67,739 | 2 |
The National Top 10
| US rank | Beach | State | Instagram posts | Posts per meter |
| 1 | Laguna | California | 3,438,696 | 2,292 |
| 2 | Waikiki | Hawaii | 4,643,578 | 1,862 |
| 3 | South Beach | Florida | 8,255,624 | 1,631 |
| 4 | La Jolla Cove | California | 403,879 | 1,346 |
| 5 | Venice | California | 4,527,446 | 1,051 |
| 6 | Newport | California | 4,368,201 | 728 |
| 7 | Huntington | California | 3,749,440 | 682 |
| 8 | Redondo | California | 1,549,959 | 646 |
| 9 | Manhattan Beach | California | 1,755,296 | 516 |
| 10 | Asbury Park | New Jersey | 1,243,530 | 497 |
How the Study Was Done
The methodology, in brief:
- Instagram post totals for each beach’s hashtag were collected on September 10, 2026.
- Beaches were selected in advance as a seed list of the best-known beach in each US state.
- Any beach with fewer than 10,000 posts was excluded from the rankings.
- Beach lengths came from OpenStreetMap where mapped, and from published length data where they weren’t.
- The posts-per-meter score divides each beach’s total post count by its length in meters.
Sources: Instagram hashtag counts via the public tag endpoint (instagram.com); beach lengths via OpenStreetMap (openstreetmap.org) and published beach-length data.
Research and data provided by Hot Spring Spas NZ.
