Miami on the Water: What Jet Skis, Boats and Charters Cost
By Matt Spaulding · August 29, 2026
Photo: Photograph: Radomianin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Miami jet ski ads quote $130 to $155 an hour. What leaves your account depends on three things the ad skips: whether Florida will let you rent one at all, how big a hold the operator puts on your card, and what parking costs at the marina. Prices below come from five operators' own booking pages in August 2026, and they move often.
What an hour on a jet ski costs right now
Ocean Force Adventures, at Miami Beach Marina, sells a jet ski with a guide boat alongside: $155 for an hour, $275 for two, $395 for three, plus $55 per extra passenger, with fuel, insurance and life jackets in the price. Miami Beach Jet Ski looks cheaper at $130 an hour for a single and $180 for a double, with taxes and marina fees added on top. Funwaves advertises a combo from $145 an hour and takes a 30% deposit at booking. At Dinner Key Marina in Coconut Grove, singles are $135 and doubles $165, one-hour minimum, with 250 lb and 350 lb weight limits.
SF Jet Ski Rentals builds the discount into the ad: a one-hour ski plus 30-minute boat combo listed at $199 and sold at $155. Whether $199 was ever charged is not checkable from a booking page. Pickup is at Haulover Marina, DKR Marine or the Kimpton EPIC Hotel downtown.
The rule that stops people at the counter
Two ages apply. Florida sets the minimum age to operate a personal watercraft at 14, but you must be at least 18 to rent one, and a livery cannot knowingly rent to anyone younger. A 16-year-old can legally ride the jet ski you rent, and cannot rent it.
The card is the bigger catch. Anyone born on or after January 1, 1988 must carry a Florida Boating Safety Education ID Card plus photo ID to operate any vessel of 10 horsepower or more, and a rental jet ski counts. Statute 327.395's exemption list has nothing in it for renters. The one exemption that helps is having a card-holding adult aboard who takes responsibility for the vessel. Ride solo, born in 1988 or later, and you need that card before you reach the dock.
An FWC-approved online course gets it: Boat-Ed's Florida course is $54.95 and runs three to four hours, others roughly $35 to $60. Funwaves points customers at a $9.99 Florida Temporary Boating Certificate from boattests101.com instead, about 30 minutes. Since July 1, 2025 every Florida livery also needs a free annual FWC Livery Operator Permit and must give each operator a pre-ride safety briefing recorded on a signed FWC form. That briefing happens before you ride, so leave time for it.
The deposit is the number to ask about first
Operators diverge most here, and hardly any advertise it. The Dinner Key operator collects a refundable $150 security deposit per jet ski at check-in, with up to $500 more assessed for severe damage. Jet Ski On the Go instead puts a $1,000 hold per jet ski on your credit card, released only after safe return and inspection, which its policy page says takes one to three days. It adds that recovery of damages is not limited to that hold. Same machine, same city, and either $150 or $1,000 of your credit limit is tied up all afternoon.
Fuel surcharges, and the fees that are genuinely there
Fuel surcharges are what people warn each other about, and they do not appear on these operators' own pages. Ocean Force includes fuel and insurance, and Jet Ski On the Go delivers the ski full. Miami Water Sports includes fuel on its speedboat tour, then adds tax and a separate marina fee at check-in. The gaps are elsewhere: Miami Beach Jet Ski's $130 excludes taxes and marina fees, Ocean Force's tour pages exclude marina parking and gratuity, extra riders are $55, a GoPro at Dinner Key is $39, and Funwaves wants 30% up front.
If you would rather drive a boat than a jet ski
A 21 to 23 foot deck boat or center console rents for roughly $99 to $180 for two hours, $290 to $430 for four, and $675 to $792 for a full day. Almost none of those blocks include fuel. A Boatsetter listing off Rickenbacker bills $35 for each quarter tank used, and RentABoat adds gas at a flat $25 an hour on top of $145 an hour for the boat, which makes a four-hour trip there $680 rather than $580.
The deposit is the number that actually matters, and it is the one nobody leads with. Two comparable Boatsetter listings hold $500 and $1,000 against damage. RentABoat takes $600 on the day and wants a separate $200 up front just to hold the reservation. That is several hundred dollars committed before you have left the dock, and it clears back to your card after the boat is checked in and inspected, not when you step off it.
A captain is how you skip the card
The card rule that catches jet ski renters catches boat renters the same way, because a rental boat is comfortably past 10 horsepower. What changes is who it applies to. The card is required of the person operating the vessel, so when a hired captain is driving, the requirement is theirs rather than yours.
Operators price around this. Aquarius Boat Rental in Miami Beach puts a captain on every boat as a condition of renting, bundles the fee into a quoted price starting at $360, and says plainly in its own FAQ that the card requirement does not apply when you rent with a captain. Where a captain is optional the going rate is about $40 to $50 an hour, so four hours is $160 to $200 to make the paperwork someone else's problem, and it buys you somebody who knows where the sandbars are.
Read each operator's own rules as well, because several are stricter than the state. Miami Boat Rent will not hand over a boat without a captain unless you are at least 30, have prior experience and pass a test drive. One Boatsetter listing confines you to Biscayne Bay and the intracoastal and forbids the open ocean outright. And RentABoat's own page states Florida's rule backwards, telling you a card is required if you were born before 1988, when the law says on or after. Do not take a rental company's word for what the state requires.
A $129 seat, or a $499 boat
Ocean Force's sightseeing tours are two hours in a rigid inflatable capped at six guests. The Ultimate Miami Boat Tour starts at $169 per person shared or $499 private; the Biscayne Bay Speed Boat Tour starts at $129 shared, same $499 private. The arithmetic turns at four: four shared seats at $129 is $516, and the private boat holds six for $499.
Cancellation is the catch. Cancel inside 48 hours on standard terms and you get a 12-month credit voucher instead of your money. A refund up to four hours out exists, but only if you bought roughly $10 of cancellation insurance at booking, and using it costs $6 more in processing. Flexibility is a separate purchase.
The big cruise covers the same water for $35
If you want to look at the bay rather than drive across it, Island Queen's Millionaire's Row cruise is 90 narrated minutes at $35 an adult and $25 a child, from inside Bayside Marketplace on Biscayne Boulevard. A family of four pays $120 against $676 for four shared speedboat seats, on a 74-foot double decker rather than a six-seat inflatable. The catches are on land: swap the emailed voucher for a boarding pass at a Bayside booth 45 minutes before departure, tickets are non-refundable, and all parking at Bayside is paid.
Parasailing is sold by weight, not by headcount
Flights run about $100 to $150 a person. Miami Watersports at Dinner Key advertises $115, takes a $10 per seat deposit with the balance due at the marina, then adds tax and a marina fee at check-in that it does not publish. South Beach Parasail starts at $100. Fuel is included at both, which is a change from nearly everything else on this page.
The number that decides your booking is not the price, it is the weight band. South Beach Parasail publishes a 180 pound minimum and a 450 pound maximum, and that 450 is the combined weight of everyone on the line. Two or three people fly together under the single ceiling, which is why the per person price does not fall when you add someone. One light adult cannot go up alone and gets paired with somebody.
If someone in your group wants to ride the boat without flying, ask before you book. South Beach Parasail sells observer seats at $45, only when the trip is not full, first come first served. Most operators do not mention observers at all. What you are buying either way is six to ten minutes in the air inside about an hour on the water.
Two different things are both called deep sea fishing
The shared party boat is the cheap version and it is genuinely cheap. Kelley Fishing Fleet at Haulover runs four hour drift trips at $79 for adults and $60 for children ten and under, with a full eight hour day at $110 and $80. Reward Fishing Fleet's four hour trips start at $75. Rod, reel, tackle and the fishing license are in the ticket, because the boat's license covers everyone aboard, so there is nothing to buy beforehand.
The private charter wears the same words and is a different product. Double Threat Charters quotes $1,400 for a half day and $2,200 for a full day on a 43 foot boat, and those are prices for the whole boat rather than per person. Split six ways the half day is $233 each. That is three times the party boat, and what the difference buys is a boat that goes where you ask instead of where the schedule goes.
Two costs sit outside the quoted number. Reward adds an automatic 18 percent gratuity for parties of five or more, so a group of six should read $75 a head as $88.50. On the private boats a 15 to 20 percent tip is described as appreciated rather than added. Fish cleaning is free at Double Threat, who fillet and bag at the dock, while the party boats describe it only as a small fee and do not publish one.
For something that only really exists here, the peacock bass in the Miami-Dade canal system are a genuine local oddity, an introduced South American fish caught in suburban drainage canals rather than out at sea. Capt. Shane Procell publishes his rates plainly, which is rarer than it should be: $650 for a half day, $750 for three quarters and $850 for a full day, covering two anglers with $100 for each angler beyond that.
Where you launch, and what that does to your parking
Departures spread across the whole bay: Miami Beach Marina at the south end of South Beach, Haulover past Bal Harbour, Dinner Key in Coconut Grove, and the Island Queen from Bayside downtown. Parking is on you at every one.
Where you sleep is part of the price. South Beach is nearest the Miami Beach Marina departures, though nearly every hotel there is valet only: Loews Miami Beach is $60 a night for valet on top of a $50 resort fee, and Angler's Hotel Miami Beach is $45 plus tax with no self-park option. Moxy Miami South Beach is one of the few that lets you self-park, at $54 a day. Downtown suits the Bayside cruise and the EPIC pickup: Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay self-parks at $45 a day with no published resort fee, while the EPIC is valet only at $58 plus tax with a $40 amenity fee. Leaving the car in the hotel garage and taking a rideshare usually beats paying to park twice.
Rules that can end a ride early
Three Florida rules catch visitors out. Personal watercraft cannot run from a half hour after sunset to a half hour before sunrise, navigation lights or not, so a sunset ride has a hard stop built in. Every rider wears a Coast Guard-approved non-inflatable life jacket; the inflatable belt-pack kind is banned on a PWC. And the engine cutoff lanyard, where fitted, clips to your body, clothing or life jacket rather than looping over the handlebars.
Price the day as a stack: the advertised hour, plus tax and any marina fee, plus $55 for a third rider where that is charged, plus parking at the launch, plus $150 to $1,000 held on your card until the boat is back and inspected. Born in 1988 or later, add $9.99 to $54.95 for the certificate, and buy it before ride day.
