Best Beaches in the US

From Pacific cliffs and Hawaiian bays to Outer Banks dunes, Great Lakes sand, and Gulf sugar, these are the beaches across the country worth the drive, the flight, or the ferry. Some you walk a mile to reach, some you take a boat or a ferry, and a few you just pull off the highway and gasp. The best beaches in America, coast to coast to coast.

26 places · United States

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🏖️ Beaches

Lanikai Beach

Kailua, Oahu, HI · Oahu Windward Coast

Lanikai means heavenly sea, and the half-mile of powder-soft sand here earns the name, fronting water so clear you can count your toes in the shallows. The twin Mokulua islands sit just offshore, close enough to paddle a kayak out to the public beach on the larger one, and the sunrise over them is the reason people set their alarms. There is no parking lot, no snack bar, and no lifeguard tower, just a string of quiet residential lanes and the kind of beach that keeps landing on best-in-the-country lists.

🏖️ Beaches

Coronado Beach

San Diego, CA · San Diego

Coronado Central Beach is a mile and a half of wide, golden sand that glitters from flecks of mica, stretching beneath the turrets of the historic Hotel del Coronado just across the bay from San Diego. Regularly ranked among the best beaches in America, it offers gentle surf, year round lifeguards, and room to spread out for swimming, surfing, or a sunset stroll. With fire rings, volleyball courts, and the iconic red roofed hotel as a backdrop, it is an easy and worthwhile day trip for almost any traveler.

🏖️ Beaches

Ruby Beach

Olympic National Park, WA · Olympic Coast

Ruby Beach is the postcard of the wild Washington coast, where Highway 101 drops you onto dark sand stained faintly red by garnet crystals and scattered with bleached driftwood logs the size of telephone poles. Sea stacks rise straight out of the surf, with tree-crowned Abbey Island anchoring the view and tide pools full of starfish and anemones appearing when the water pulls back. Come an hour before sundown, climb over the driftwood, and watch the Pacific light up behind the stacks for one of the best sunsets in the country.

🏖️ Beaches

Waimea Bay

Haleiwa, Oahu, HI · Oahu North Shore

In summer the bay goes glassy and turquoise, calm enough to snorkel the rocks for green sea turtles or climb the big jump rock on the left side and leap into deep blue water. Come winter the swell flips a switch and the same cove throws 30-foot faces, drawing the world's best to the surf that gave big-wave riding its start and to the rare days the Eddie Aikau contest actually runs. It is two beaches in one bay, and both are worth the drive up the North Shore.

🏖️ Beaches

Hapuna Beach

Waimea, HI · Big Island Kohala Coast

Hapuna is the Big Island's biggest stretch of white sand, half a mile of it sloping into water that turns from turquoise in the shallows to deep blue where the bottom drops away. Dr. Beach has twice crowned it the best beach in America, and on a calm summer morning it is easy to see why: the sand is broad and soft, the swimming is open and clear, and the rocky points at either end are good for a snorkel. Winter swell can stack up shorebreak that humbles bodysurfers, so it pays to read the water, but the sunsets over the Kohala Coast are a sure thing year round.

🏖️ Beaches

Ka'anapali Beach

Lahaina, Maui, HI · Maui West Coast

Three miles of soft golden sand runs the length of West Maui's old resort row, where the swimming stays calm behind the reef and the snorkeling turns serious the moment you reach Pu'u Keka'a, the lava headland everyone calls Black Rock. Green sea turtles graze the shallows there, and most evenings a cliff diver lights the torches and leaps from the rock at sunset, a nod to the spot Hawaiians once believed was a leaping-off point for souls. A flat oceanfront path links the hotels and Whalers Village, so you can swim at dawn, snorkel the rock by midday, and still catch the sky going pink over the West Maui Mountains.

🏖️ Beaches

Caladesi Island State Park

Dunedin, FL · Tampa Bay

A roadless barrier island off Dunedin, reachable only by the ferry from Honeymoon Island or your own boat, which is exactly why its three miles of powder-white sand stay so quiet. Spread out on the wide Gulf beach, paddle the mangrove kayak trail, and work the shell-strewn flats most day-trippers skip. Just watch the last ferry back, or you are there for the night.

🏖️ Beaches

Bahia Honda State Park

Big Pine Key, FL · Florida Keys

Three white-sand beaches share one narrow key here, with Calusa and Loggerhead facing the calm Gulf side and Sandspur stretching out toward the Atlantic, all of it fronting water clear enough to read the bottom from the surface. The old Bahia Honda Rail Bridge, a remnant of Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad, arcs broken across the channel and frames nearly every photo people take from Calusa. The park runs daily snorkel boats out to Looe Key, a reef of elkhorn and star coral about seven miles offshore that many consider the best in the Keys.

🏖️ Beaches

Cumberland Island National Seashore

St. Marys, GA · Golden Isles

Cumberland Island is Georgia's largest barrier island, reachable only by ferry from St. Marys, where wild horses graze among the moss-draped oaks and tabby ruins of the Carnegie family's Dungeness estate. Beyond the historic district stretch more than 17 miles of undeveloped white-sand beach with almost no one on them. Spring and fall bring the mildest weather and the fewest bugs for hiking or biking the maritime forest.

🏖️ Beaches

Race Point Beach

Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA · Cape Cod National Seashore

Where Cape Cod finally runs out of land, the dunes give way to three miles of pale sand facing open Atlantic, and the water just offshore drops deep enough that humpbacks and even right whales surface within sight of the towel line. Because the beach points west off the tip, it is one of the only stretches on the Cape where you watch the sun sink straight into the sea, often right behind the 1876 Race Point Light. Come for the surfcasters at dawn, the seals hauled out on the bars, and a horizon with nothing on it but water.

🏖️ Beaches

Main Beach

East Hampton, NY · Long Island / The Hamptons

Main Beach is the one the rankings keep coming back to: a wide ribbon of grainy quartz sand backed by towering dunes and the old wood-shingle pavilion that has watched over the surf since the turn of the last century. The water runs clean and clear blue, the Atlantic rolls in with real surf, and lifeguards work the stretch from 10 to 5 all summer. Come early, because the Lot 1 spaces out front go fast and the village makes you earn them, but the payoff is a swimming beach that regularly lands in Dr. Beach's national top ten.

🏖️ Beaches

Cape May

Cape May, NJ · Jersey Shore

The nation's oldest seaside resort wears its age beautifully, with a row of gingerbread Victorian mansions standing watch over the sand along Beach Avenue. Spend the morning hunting Cape May diamonds at Sunset Beach, where the ribs of a sunken concrete ship break the surf, then walk the promenade to the lighthouse at the peninsula's southern tip. By evening the whole town turns toward the water for a sunset that earned this stretch of the Jersey shore its name.

🏖️ Beaches

Ogunquit Beach

Ogunquit, ME · Southern Maine Coast

Ogunquit Beach is a three-mile barrier spit with two waterfronts to choose from in a single afternoon. On the ocean side you get cool Atlantic surf and soft white sand that runs flat for hundreds of feet at low tide; turn around and the Ogunquit River slides along the back of the dunes, calm and sun-warmed, where kids drift the channel on tubes. Walk the mile-plus Marginal Way from Perkins Cove to reach it, and you understand why the Abenaki called this stretch the beautiful place by the sea, and why it keeps landing on best-of lists as New England's lone entry.

🏖️ Beaches

Assateague Island

Berlin, MD · Mid-Atlantic Barrier Islands

This is the rare American beach where wild horses walk the surf line, and they have the run of all 37 miles of undeveloped barrier sand. Drive in off Route 611 past the fee station and the Atlantic opens up wide and empty, with shifting dunes, low waves for swimming, and bands of free-roaming Assateague ponies that ignore the people entirely. Come to body-surf and beachcomb by day, then stay to camp right behind the dunes, where the night sky is dark enough to see the Milky Way over the water.

🏖️ Beaches

El Matador State Beach

Malibu, CA · Malibu

A steep staircase drops off the Pacific Coast Highway to a pocket of sand where wave-carved sea stacks and a natural rock arch rise straight out of the surf. Time it for low tide and you can wander into the sea caves at the base of the bluff; time it for the hour before sunset and the whole cove turns gold, which is why photographers crowd the arch most evenings. It is small, the parking lot fills fast, and there are no lifeguards or facilities, but few stretches of California coast pack this much drama into one short walk down.

🏖️ Beaches

Pictured Rocks / Twelvemile Beach

Munising, Upper Peninsula, MI · Lake Superior

Twelvemile Beach earns its name with a single golden sweep of sand running unbroken along Lake Superior, backed by a wall of white birch and pine instead of parking lots or condos. The water stays clear and cold enough to keep the crowds thin, so most days you share the shoreline with a handful of hikers off the North Country Trail and the occasional bald eagle. Sleep in the bluff-top campground, walk down the stairs at dawn, and the whole horizon is yours before the sun clears the trees.

🏖️ Beaches

Hunting Island State Park

Hunting Island, SC · South Carolina Lowcountry

A wild semitropical barrier island a short drive east of Beaufort, where the Atlantic keeps rewriting the shoreline. Walk the boneyard beach of bleached, weathered driftwood, then follow the trail back through a maritime forest of palmettos and live oaks to the black-and-white 1875 Hunting Island Lighthouse. It is the most-visited state park in South Carolina, and the climb up the tower earns you the whole sweep of the Lowcountry coast.

🏖️ Beaches

Padre Island National Seashore

Corpus Christi, TX · Texas Gulf Coast

This is the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island left in the world, seventy miles of Gulf shore where the paved road ends and the beach simply keeps going. Drive past the last access point and you trade lifeguards and boardwalks for shelling at the tide line, wildflowers in the dunes, and the kind of solitude that is hard to find on an American coast anymore. Come in summer and you can watch park biologists release Kemp's ridley sea-turtle hatchlings, the most endangered sea turtle in the world, scrambling down the sand toward the surf.