Guide

Beach water: who samples, and what an advisory means

Checked October 4, 2026 against the Florida Department of Health’s Healthy Beaches results and its beach water quality page.

The beach tile shows what the Florida Department of Health’s Healthy Beaches program publishes for the 344 sites it samples on these boards, from Perdido Key round the peninsula to Fernandina Beach and down the Keys, for Enterococcus bacteria. The tile gives each site’s result and the day of its last sample. This page says how the tile reads that, and what it cannot tell you.

What the tile shows

The tile reads the Department’s own results, the same ones its beach map shows: for each site, the count of enterococci in the last sample, whether an advisory is up, and the day of the sample. The levels are the Department’s.

• Good: 0 to 35 enterococci per 100 milliliters of marine water.
• Moderate: 36 to 70.
• Poor: 71 or more. A Poor sample is usually resampled first, so the tile shows Poor as Check, not as an advisory.
• Advisory: in the Department’s words, if a result exceeds 70 “and a resampling result also exceeds this value, then an ‘Advisory’ would be issued for the sampling site.” The tile shows an advisory exactly when the Department’s results say one is up.
• No result means no sample was taken, because of the weather or something else, or the lab gave no result. Anything the Department says that the tile does not recognise shows as Check, never as clear.
• Sampling is weekly or every two weeks, depending on the site, so a sample can be two weeks old. The tile always prints its date.
• Each site is filed under the nearest town on its own county’s board. A few sit more than eight miles from it, at Miramar Beach, Scenic Gulf Drive, Lookout Beach, Beacon Hill, the St. George Island State Park, Gandy Boulevard and Picnic Island. Barefoot Beach and Delnor-Wiggins Pass are Collier County sites at the Lee County line, so they are filed under Naples, about ten miles south, though Bonita Springs is nearer.

On October 2, 2026 one site had an advisory up: Bayou Texar at Bayview Park in Pensacola. Navy Point Park and Garniers Park had Poor samples on September 28 with no advisory yet.

Every site the Department samples

The list is every site the Department reported results for in its last eight sampling periods, read from its own pages, by stretch, north and west first.

Pensacola to Destin

Walton and Bay counties

The Forgotten Coast and the Big Bend

The Nature Coast

Tampa Bay

Sarasota to Bonita Springs

Collier County

The First Coast

The Space Coast

The Treasure Coast

The Gold Coast

The Florida Keys

Some towns have no site at all. Apalachicola, Eastpoint and St. Marks have none filed under them. On the Atlantic neither do Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Oak Hill, Titusville, Merritt Island, Cocoa, Rockledge, Indian Harbour Beach, Melbourne, Palm Bay, Port St. Lucie, North Palm Beach, West Palm Beach or Cutler Bay: their nearest sites are filed under the beach towns beside them. In Dixie County the Department’s last result is from Shired Island Park in August 2011, so Steinhatchee, Horseshoe Beach and Suwannee have none; in Levy County its last is from Cedar Key Park in August 2011, so Cedar Key and Yankeetown have none. Homosassa, Clearwater, Treasure Island, Gulfport, Apollo Beach, Palmetto, Bradenton, Punta Gorda, Bokeelia, Matlacha, Fort Myers, Goodland, Everglades City and Chokoloskee have none of their own either. For every one of those towns the beach tile lists the board’s sites nearest first, with how far each is. Anywhere not listed above is not sampled. A beach nobody samples is not a clean beach. It is a beach with no result.

What it cannot tell you

The program tests for Enterococcus, a sign of sewage and runoff. It does not test for Vibrio, which lives naturally in warm salt and brackish water, or for red tide.

Sources

• Florida Department of Health, beach water quality — what Good, Moderate and Poor mean, and when an advisory is issued
• Florida Department of Health, Healthy Beaches results (Escambia County) — the results the tile reads, one page a county; the others by name, for example Pinellas and Collier