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We’ve had numerous estimates of what Florida’s population growth was last year, often coming from moving companies based on migration reports. While dissecting the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s annual Uniform Crime Report, I realized their population totals were the first finalized from an official source. While the state’s fiscal year runs from October thru September, the FDLE’s report provides official numbers for the calendar year.
In the year of the pandemic, Florida’s population went up by 387,479. Remember how we were hearing that we were averaging 800-900 new Floridians per day? Try 1,061. The unofficial estimates weren’t just off. They were under told the real proliferation of Florida’s population in 2020. As for South Florida, we added 12,568 in Broward County, 20,664 in Miami-Dade, and 18,637 in Palm Beach County.
Notably, while South Florida continues to grow at a significant pace, Palm Beach County is adding population at a much faster pace than more populous Broward, and nearly at the pace of Florida’s most populous county in Dade. Florida’s growth story generally is remarkable in the context of the pandemic where most Americans spent much of the year locked down and unable to move even if they wanted to. If the actuals from 2020 came in significantly above the estimates, it’s likely that in real-time Florida migration is higher than what we’ve been hearing as well.