Every few weeks a buyer sends me a headline about people fleeing Florida and asks whether they are about to make an expensive mistake.
The headline is not wrong. The conclusion people draw from it usually is.
Let me show you what the data actually says, where it comes from, and why a statewide average is close to useless for deciding whether to move to St. Johns County.
The Number Behind the Headline
Florida’s net domestic migration, meaning people moving in from other states minus people moving out to other states, fell from roughly 310,000 in 2022 to 22,517 in the year ending July 2025. That is a decline of about 93 percent from the peak.
That figure is real, it comes from Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates, and it is genuinely a big shift. Florida is not absorbing people the way it did during the pandemic surge.
But 22,517 is a net figure across 67 counties, and those counties are not moving together.
The Counties Are Pulling in Opposite Directions
Miami-Dade lost nearly 73,000 residents to domestic migration in 2025, according to the Shimberg Center at the University of Florida. More people left for other Florida counties and other states than arrived from elsewhere in the US.
That single county’s outflow is more than three times the entire state’s net gain. When one county is bleeding that many people and the statewide number still lands positive, other counties are clearly absorbing them.
St. Johns County is one of them. Population reached 346,328 in July 2025, up 3.9 percent, the fastest growth rate of any county in Florida. Net domestic migration was roughly 12,500 on a total gain of about 13,000.
Read those two numbers together. Almost every new resident of St. Johns County came from somewhere else. This is not a place growing because of births exceeding deaths. It is growing because people are moving here on purpose.
Duval County, immediately north, tells a different story again. Population hit 1,062,963 in July 2025, up 8,232 or 0.78 percent. Net domestic migration was about 101 people. International migration contributed around 4,800 and natural increase about 3,300.
So Jacksonville proper has essentially flat domestic migration while the county directly south of it is the fastest-growing in the state. Same metro area. Completely different dynamics.
I want to be precise about what that comparison does and does not prove. It does not mean Duval is emptying out, because it still grew. It means the domestic movers coming to Northeast Florida are overwhelmingly choosing St. Johns County, and Duval’s growth is coming from international arrivals and natural increase instead.
Where the 2026 Movers Are Coming From
Census data runs on a lag. For something closer to right now, Florida driver’s license transfers give a rougher but faster read.
The first half of 2026 came in as the highest first half since 2023. The top origin states were:
- New York, with 23,436
- Georgia
- New Jersey
- California
- Texas
For perspective, the first half of 2019, well before the pandemic surge, was 173,047. So the current pace is clearly off the 2022 frenzy and still running above where Florida was pre-pandemic.
Georgia at number two is the one I pay attention to locally. Downtown Jacksonville sits about 25 miles from the Georgia line. For a family in the Atlanta suburbs or coastal Georgia, moving to Northeast Florida is a drive, not a life overhaul. That proximity does not show up in a statewide narrative at all.
Who Is Actually Moving
There is a second assumption baked into most Florida coverage, which is that this is retirement migration.
U-Haul’s midyear report covering one-way moves from July 2025 through June 2026 ranked Florida number one in the country for Gen X, number one for Millennials, third for Baby Boomers, and eighth for Gen Z. It was the only state in America to land a top-ten net gain across all four generations.
Florida Realtors economists found the largest net household income flowing into the state came from households ages 55 to 64, at $7.6 billion across 2023 and 2024. That is not retirement money. That is people at peak earning years arriving with equity and income still working.
One caveat worth knowing if you go looking at the U-Haul data yourself: Jacksonville does not appear in any of their metro top-ten lists. The Florida metros that ranked were Gainesville-Ocala, Daytona Beach, Fort Myers, North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, Tampa, Orlando, Lakeland-Winter Haven, and Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville. So treat the generational finding as a statewide signal, and use the Census county data for anything Jacksonville-specific.
What I Take From All of This
Three things.
The slowdown is real and it is mostly a South Florida story. Cost of living, insurance, and condo assessments pushed a lot of people out of the tricounty area. If your mental model of Florida was built from Miami coverage, it does not describe Northeast Florida.
Slower statewide growth is not automatically bad for a buyer. The 2022 pace produced bidding wars and waived inspections. A market absorbing people at a sustainable rate is a market where you can negotiate, get an inspection, and take a week to think.
County-level data beats state-level data every time. Florida is 67 counties with wildly different economies, coastlines, insurance profiles, and tax bases. Any statistic reported at the state level is averaging across places that have nothing to do with each other.
The Practical Version
If you are weighing a move here, do not let a national headline set your expectations, and do not let a local agent’s optimism set them either. Pull the county numbers. The Census Bureau publishes them, the Shimberg Center at UF publishes analysis of them, and both are free.
Then ask a narrower question than “is Florida still growing.” Ask whether the specific submarket you are looking at has inventory, what it costs to carry, and how long homes are sitting. Those are the numbers that determine what you actually pay.
If you want me to pull current figures for a specific area in St. Johns or Duval, message me. I would rather you make this decision on county data than on a headline written about a market four hours away.