Melbourne, West Melbourne, Melbourne Beach and Melbourne Village — Melbourne, Florida

They are four separate local governments that share a name and a corner of south Brevard County. The City of Melbourne is the large one, a council-manager city that, by its own description, sits astride the Indian River Lagoon, with most of its land on the mainland and a portion on the barrier island. The City of Melbourne gives its population as 88,499 (Bureau of Economic and Business Research, 2025) and its size as 51.59 square miles as of March 2026. The City of West Melbourne lies inland to the west, the Town of Melbourne Beach sits on the barrier island across the lagoon, and the Town of Melbourne Village is a small enclave off U.S. 192 on the mainland.

Each one has its own council or commission, its own city hall and its own codes. A Melbourne mailing address alone does not settle which of the four governments applies, so city and town websites are the reliable guide to limits, permits and elections. The sections below take each town in turn, with the date and reason it was formed, since three of the four were created at least partly in response to the growth of the original City of Melbourne.

The present City of Melbourne is itself the product of a merger. The Eau Gallie Arts District history states that Eau Gallie joined the City of Melbourne in 1969, and that locals still call the area Eau Gallie. Before then Eau Gallie was a separate community, and the combined city kept the Melbourne name, which is why the Eau Gallie Arts District today lies inside the City of Melbourne rather than beside it.

Melbourne's charter provides for a council-manager form of government in which the Melbourne City Council sets policy, the budget and the tax rate, and appoints a city manager and a city attorney. The Melbourne council also appoints volunteers to municipal boards, and residents may speak at public hearings held before new laws pass and before the budget and property tax rate are final. In U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2023 figures, Melbourne had 85,718 residents, a median age of 42.3 and a median household income of $64,504. That scale is why the smaller Melbournes around it were each shaped, in different decades, by worries about being absorbed into it.

West Melbourne was formed as a defensive move. The City of West Melbourne history page states that the city was created in 1959 in order to avoid annexation into the City of Melbourne and to prevent the levying of ad valorem taxes. It provided limited services at first: its first annual audit showed revenues of $13,578, against $37,028,775 in the 2019-2020 audit. A 1955 photo on the same page shows the Platt Family Grocery Store on US 192 (New Haven Avenue), the road that still links West Melbourne to downtown Melbourne.

Growth since then has been steep. West Melbourne counted 3,050 people in the 1970 Census and 25,924 in the 2020 Census, and its demographics page gives a current estimate of 32,476 residents in 10.76 square miles. The two cities still share infrastructure: West Melbourne buys its water from the City of Melbourne and resells it through its own lines and meters to over 10,000 water and sewer customers. West Melbourne runs a council-manager government with a seven-member City Council that includes the mayor, and its City Hall is at 2240 Minton Road. The West Melbourne mayor is head of city government for ceremonial purposes only and votes like any other council member. On its home page the city promotes the Ellis Road widening from two to four lanes, intended to improve access to Melbourne Orlando International Airport after the 2020 I-95 interchange opened.

Melbourne Beach is older than its incorporation suggests and smaller than its name implies. The Town of Melbourne Beach calls itself Brevard County's oldest beach community, established 1883. Its town history records that in 1883 Major Cyrus Graves, a Union veteran, began buying government land that now forms Melbourne Beach at $1.25 an acre, and that the foundations of the town were laid in the winter of 1888-1889. A state historical marker identifies Myrtle Cottage, built in 1888 on Ocean Avenue, as the first house in the area known as Melbourne Beach.

Access shaped the town. The Indian River Lagoon National Scenic Byway describes the Melbourne Beach Pier, built between 1888 and 1889, as the oldest known example of its type on the Indian River, with a short railway carrying passengers 7/10 of a mile from the ferry landing to the ocean. A ferry run by the Beaujean family served the pier from 1889 to 1923. The town history states that the 1921 toll bridge from Melbourne to Indialantic ended the need for the ferry and became the catalyst for incorporation in 1923, when the town needed bonds to pave roads for cars. Through World War II Melbourne Beach still had no more than one hundred residents; the town now reports over three thousand, governed by a Town Commission from the complex at 507 Ocean Avenue.

Melbourne Village began as a planned homesteading experiment. According to the Florida Tech Secret History account of Virginia Wood, the American Homesteading Foundation received its official charter from the State of Ohio in 1946, and in 1947 Wood came to Melbourne and found land just outside the Melbourne city limits on the Kissimmee (US 192) Highway. Wood founded the foundation with Elizabeth Nutting and Margaret Hutchison, a partnership that the State Archives of Florida also records in its Florida Memory catalog.

A 2022 Space Coast Living history reports that the founders bought 80 acres at $75 an acre, that the foundation sold lots only to approved settlers, and that the Town of Melbourne Village incorporated in 1957 to halt possible annexation by Melbourne or West Melbourne. The American Homesteading Foundation still maintains 52 acres of park land and a community pool in Melbourne Village. The same circle of founders helped launch Ralph Borsodi's University of Melbourne in the 1950s, and the Florida Memory record notes that its land and buildings were later sold to Brevard Engineering College, which became Florida Institute of Technology. Town business is run from the Melbourne Village Town Center at 555 Hammock Road.