How we know this

A directory is only worth reading if you can see where its facts come from. This page says what we measure, what we refuse to publish, and what this site cannot tell you.

Where the facts come from

• What visitors wrote. We read the public reviews for every beach, 680,142 of them so far, spanning 2010–2026, and turn repeated reports into structured facts: parking pressure, the walk, cost, restrooms, whether it suits small children. Every published fact carries how many visitors mentioned it and which years those mentions span. We never republish the reviews themselves.
• Open map data. Beach outlines, parking, restrooms, showers, drinking water and picnic tables from OpenStreetMap, used under the Open Database License (ODbL). Every distance on this site is measured on that geometry, to the nearest edge of a car park rather than its centre, because you get out of the car at the edge.
• Public-domain aerial photography. USGS NAIP imagery, with the survey year printed under every map. A beach moves, so the year matters more here than it would for a building.
• Live conditions. Tide predictions and water temperature from NOAA, waves and weather from Open-Meteo. These are fetched by your browser when you open the page, not baked in when the page was built, so they are current even if the page is not.

Why drawings instead of photographs

Each beach illustration is based on public aerial imagery and mapped geographic data. The drawings make parking, access, sand and water easier to read at a glance than a top-down photograph, especially over shallow water.

Facility markers come from mapped coordinates, not from the illustration itself. Every number on the page comes from the data. If the drawing and the numbers disagree, the numbers are right.

Every illustration is checked by a person against its own aerial photograph before it is published. Where a beach has no illustration we show the aerial photograph instead. The illustrations are for orientation. For navigation, use the linked map or the official source.

What we hold back

We hold back information we cannot verify reliably. Some attributes are collected but not published because the evidence is too inconsistent across visitors. We are especially cautious with anything that could be read as a safety claim, and we do not publish one.

How we check it

We regularly review samples by hand against the original sources. If a category is not reliable enough, we stop publishing it until it improves.

What this cannot tell you

Conditions change. Parking rules, tides, weather, facilities and access can change after we collect them. Check official signs and local guidance when you arrive.

This is not safety advice. We do not assess swimming safety, currents, lifeguard coverage or whether conditions suit a particular person.

The water quality rating is one number, not a verdict on the beach. It counts how often state-run bacteria samples came back above the EPA limit in the last season on record: Good is 5% of samples or fewer, Mixed is up to 25%, Poor is more than that. It says nothing about the day you visit, and states report months to a year late, so the year is always shown. Where a state does not test a beach, we show nothing rather than a guess.

Distances are estimates. Walking and parking distances are calculated from available map data and may differ from the route you actually take.

Illustrations are for orientation. They are not navigation maps and should not be used in place of official signage or directions.

Something wrong?

Beaches change, fees change, and restrooms close for the season. We would rather hear it from you than leave it wrong.