We ship cars to Florida for a living, so this may be an odd thing to read on our own website: for most snowbird couples leaving the Northeast this fall, driving the car down is cheaper than shipping it. We ran the numbers on the typical trip from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England, using the prices our customers booked on these exact lanes against today’s gas, hotel and meal costs. A couple that drives both ways keeps about $1,200 a season in their pocket. The picture changes for anyone who gives up workdays to make the drive, for a household with a second car and one willing driver, and above all for the trip home in the spring.
The Couple’s Math: About $1,200 a Season
A typical Northeast to Florida move in our records covers about 1,250 road miles, which is three days behind the wheel and two nights in hotels at a steady 500 miles a day. For a couple sharing one car, the trip costs about $500 for the car itself (gas, tires and maintenance, and the depreciation those miles add, per AAA), about $345 for two hotel nights, and about $410 for three days of meals for two. Call it $1,250 each way.
Shipping the same car south last fall ran about $1,100 on an open carrier, and two one-way plane tickets at the national average fare add about $610. Heading home, the car cost about $1,400 to ship this past spring. Here is how the options stack up:
Cheap flights narrow the gap but do not close it. Even if you find tickets well below the national average, say $150 each way, the couple who drives both ways still comes out about $600 ahead over the season.
The same arithmetic, run across every distance and every state, is in our 2026 ship-or-drive break-even report. The short version: shipping wins on cash alone only past about 2,000 miles, and Florida from the Northeast sits well inside that line.
The Trip Home Costs More Than the Trip Down
If there is one number in this piece worth taping to the refrigerator, it is this one. Southbound bookings from the Northeast are spread across the calendar, with no single month carrying more than about one in eight of them, because summer movers and retirees share the lanes with seasonal residents. Northbound is a different animal: about three in four of our Florida to Northeast bookings land between March and June, as a whole season of snowbirds tries to leave in the same few weeks.
Carriers price that crunch. Over the past several seasons, a car heading north in the spring has cost about a third more to ship than the same trip at other times of year, and the premium grew this year: the typical spring 2026 northbound car ran about $1,400, up from about $1,200 the spring before. Our snowbird migration index maps the weeks when that rush peaks, and our price calendar shows the same squeeze from the national side.
Snowbirds heading home seem to know it. The typical northbound customer books about ten days before the car is ready to go, against about six days for a southbound booking, and even in the thick of the March to June rush nearly nine in ten northbound cars in our records had a carrier assigned within two days of their ready date. Booking early buys certainty more than it buys a lower price.
When Shipping Is the Right Call
Cash is not the only thing on the table, and for plenty of households the math above tips the other way:
- You are still working. Three days on Interstate 95 each way is six days a season. Price those days at average pay and shipping comes out about $550 ahead on every trip.
- Two cars, one driver who wants to drive. Driving both cars saves money, but it means two people each spending three days alone behind the wheel. Shipping one and riding together in the other costs about $600 more and turns the trip back into a shared one.
- A lease with a mileage cap. A round trip adds roughly 2,500 miles to the odometer every season, a quarter of a 10,000 mile annual allowance, and lease overage charges come due at turn-in.
- You were going to fly anyway. If you are visiting family on the way down, splitting the season, or arriving after a trip abroad, the plane tickets are already in the budget and the only cost left to compare is the truck.
- Three long days are not appealing. That is a perfectly good reason. The drive is a real physical cost that no spreadsheet captures.
There is a middle road for part of the trip, too. Amtrak’s Auto Train carries passengers and their cars overnight between Lorton, Virginia and Sanford, Florida, which trims the longest stretch of Interstate 95 but still leaves the drive to Lorton and back. Its fares move with the date, so price it for your own travel days beside a shipping quote.
If You Ship, How to Pay Less
Three habits separate the snowbirds who pay the top of the range from the ones who pay the middle of it. Book the northbound leg when you book the southbound one, or at least before the spring rush builds in March, because the carrier market on those lanes tightens week by week. Keep a few days of flexibility on the pickup date, which lets dispatch put your car on a truck that is already running the corridor. And choose an open carrier for an ordinary car: enclosed transport costs about a third more on the same lane and buys little for a car that will sit in a Florida driveway all winter.
Lane by lane prices from our own books are on our New York to Florida, New Jersey to Florida, Pennsylvania to Florida and Massachusetts to Florida pages, and our snowbird car shipping page covers the details of a seasonal move.
Methodology
Northeast means New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Shipping prices are booked tariffs for a single passenger vehicle (cars, SUVs and pickups) on an open carrier in Ship A Car, Inc. records: the southbound figure is the median for Northeast to Florida bookings made from September through December 2025, the northbound figures are the medians for Florida to Northeast bookings made from March through June of 2025 and 2026, and the spring premium compares March through June northbound bookings with the rest of the year across 2023 to 2026. Monthly shares count all vehicle types booked from 2023 onward, booking lead times use passenger vehicles booked from 2023 onward, and carrier timing uses dispatched orders of all types. Road miles are estimated from pickup and delivery zip codes, scaled by routing factors calibrated against real driving routes. Driving costs follow our national break-even report: AAA’s 2026 marginal cost per mile repriced to today’s gas (about 39 cents), the STR/CoStar U.S. average hotel rate for July 2026 ($172), the GSA standard federal meals rate ($68 per person per day), the BTS average domestic one-way fare for the first quarter of 2026 ($305), and BLS average hourly earnings for August 2026 for the value of a workday. Every figure here is a median or a share rather than a volume, and none of it identifies a customer.
Editors and reporters are welcome to cite these figures with a link to this page. A cut for a single state or metro area is available on request at the number below.
Common Questions
Is it cheaper for snowbirds to ship their car to Florida or drive it? For a couple leaving the Northeast, driving is usually cheaper: about $1,250 each way in gas, wear, hotels and meals, against about $1,700 to ship the car south and fly, and about $2,000 to ship it home in the spring and fly. Over a full season that is roughly $1,200 in favor of driving.
How much does it cost to ship a car from the Northeast to Florida? A typical open-carrier booking from the Northeast to Florida ran about $1,100 last fall. Prices vary by state and date; our lane pages show the middle half of our own bookings for New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
Why does shipping a car back north in the spring cost more? Because most snowbirds leave Florida in the same window: about three in four of our northbound bookings fall between March and June, and carriers price the demand. Spring northbound cars have cost about a third more than the same trip at other times of year.
When should snowbirds book the trip home? Before the March rush if you can, or together with the southbound booking. Our northbound customers typically book about ten days ahead of their ready date, and nearly nine in ten had a carrier within two days of it even in the spring rush.
When does shipping make more sense than driving? When the drive costs you workdays, when a second car would otherwise need its own driver, when a lease has a mileage cap, when you are flying anyway, or when three days on the interstate is simply not how you want to start the season.
Get a Quote
Call Ship A Car, Inc. at (866) 821-4555 with your two zip codes and your dates, and a coordinator will price the trip down and the trip home together so you can set them beside your own driving math, or start with the instant calculator.
