Florida’s shark-bite season is here, and the state still logs more bites than anywhere

Summer along Florida’s coast brings the predictable overlap of two crowds in the same water: swimmers and surfers on one side, sharks following bait fish on the other. Warm weather draws people into the surf just as seasonal conditions push more sharks close to shore, and the result is that the state records more shark bites than any other place on the planet. The pattern is old and consistent, and it holds again in the most recent tally.

The numbers are collected and vetted by scientists rather than assembled from headlines, which makes them a rare case of a scary-sounding statistic that can actually be pinned down. What that record shows is a phenomenon that is both very real, in the sense that Florida genuinely leads the count, and very rare, in the sense that any individual’s odds of being bitten remain vanishingly small.

Why Florida leads the count year after year

The authoritative source for these figures is the International Shark Attack File, maintained at the Florida Museum of Natural History, whose annual worldwide summary tracks confirmed, unprovoked bites across the globe. An unprovoked bite is defined narrowly as one in which a person did nothing to initiate contact — incidents involving spearfishing or handling a hooked shark are excluded — so the count is a conservative measure of genuine wild encounters. Florida’s dominance in that count comes down to exposure: an enormous length of warm, shallow coastline, a year-round population of coastal sharks, and one of the highest volumes of ocean recreation anywhere in the world. When large numbers of people spend large amounts of time in water that also holds sharks and their prey, the arithmetic produces more encounters, even though the per-swimmer risk stays low.

Volusia County, the so-called shark-bite capital

Within Florida, the encounters concentrate heavily in one stretch of the Atlantic coast. Volusia County, home to New Smyrna Beach, is so consistently at the top of the tables that it is often called the shark-bite capital of the world. The area’s inlet and reliable surf break draw surfers and swimmers into exactly the churned, bait-rich water where small coastal sharks feed, and the sharks involved are usually modest in size — the bites tend to be quick, exploratory nips rather than deliberate predation. That is one reason Volusia can log a large share of the state’s incidents while producing very few serious injuries. According to the Florida Museum’s most recent annual report, released in February 2026, the county recorded six bites in 2025, below its recent 10-year average of nine and well under the spike of 17 bites it saw in 2021.

What the 2025 numbers actually showed

The full report frames Florida’s lead against a global picture that was, by historical standards, unremarkable. Worldwide there were 65 unprovoked bites in 2025, slightly below the most recent 10-year average of 72, with nine of those incidents proving fatal. The United States accounted for 38 percent of the world’s unprovoked bites, the highest of any country, though that share has fallen from the more than 50 percent the country logged in most years since 2019. Florida itself recorded 11 bites, below its own five-year annual average of 18. In other words, the state kept its long-standing position at the top of the rankings even in a year when its raw numbers ran below normal — a reminder that “most bites” and “an unusually dangerous year” are not the same thing. The single U.S. fatality of the year occurred not in Florida but in central California, where a swimmer was killed by a white shark in Monterey Bay.

Surfers, summer and the shape of the risk

The people most often bitten are not casual waders but surfers, who made up roughly a third of the world’s unprovoked bites in 2025. Surfers spend long stretches in the exact zone where waves break and bait fish gather, and their kicking, paddling movements can resemble the struggles of a fish to a shark cued to motion and splashing. The seasonality is straightforward: bites cluster in the warmer months when both water temperatures and beach crowds peak, which is why the height of summer is effectively the height of the encounter season along the Florida coast. That timing is part of what keeps the topic in the public eye each year — the annual return of beach weather, and of features asking whether Florida is still the shark-bite capital, arrives on the same schedule as the sharks and the swimmers.

How the odds compare to everyday hazards

For all the attention shark bites command, the researchers who compile the data are consistent on one point: the individual risk is extraordinarily low, far below hazards that draw almost no fear. Drowning kills more than 4,000 people a year in the United States alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and lightning claims far more lives worldwide than sharks. The steps that reduce the already-small risk are mundane rather than dramatic: swimming near other people, staying out of the water at dawn and dusk when sharks are most active, and keeping away from spots where people are fishing or where bait fish are visibly schooling. The Florida Museum publishes a longer list of such precautions for beachgoers. Florida’s standing as the world’s shark-bite leader, in the end, says more about how many people share its water with sharks than about how dangerous any single swim really is.

This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed before publication.

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