Is Everyone Really Leaving Florida? What the 2026 Numbers Show

A Naples couple lists the house, loads a truck, and points it north toward Tennessee.

Two exits away, a moving van from Ohio unloads into a place that sold last week.

Same road, same afternoon, opposite directions.

This is what the 2026 numbers show about who’s leaving Florida, and who isn’t.

The Number That Matters

One figure answers the leaving-Florida question, and most headlines skip right past it: It’s called net migration.

Net migration is the count of arrivals minus the count of departures.

Some Floridians pack up and leave every year.

New arrivals move in behind them every year.

The gap between those two groups is what counts.

So a state can lose hundreds of thousands of residents and still come out ahead, as long as more people move in than move out.

Florida has landed on the winning side of that math for years.

Still Second in the Country

Florida grew faster than almost anywhere else in the latest count.

The Census Bureau tallies every state’s population once a year, on July 1, using births, deaths, tax records, and address changes.

By that count, Florida added about 196,680 residents in the most recent year, reaching roughly 23.5 million.

That’s the second-biggest head-count gain of any state, behind only Texas.

Only Texas grew by more.

A place people are abandoning doesn’t put up numbers like that.

Florida is the third-largest state, and it kept growing while the fleeing story went viral.

The Boom Has Cooled

The Florida rush that defined 2021 and 2022 has slowed to a trickle by comparison.

Look at net domestic migration, which counts Americans moving in from other states minus the people who move out.

It ran near 318,000 at the 2022 peak.

Then it slid to about 184,000 in 2023, near 63,000 the next year, and close to 22,500 in the most recent count.

The boom cooled.

Higher home prices, rising insurance bills, and a normal post-pandemic settling all slowed people down.

Fewer Americans are betting on Florida than three years ago, and the newest count backs that up.

Still, that domestic number stayed above zero.

More Americans moved in than moved out, even in the slow year.

Where Floridians Are Leaving

The people packing up in Florida cluster in a few big, pricey metros.

Miami-Dade County lost about 73,000 more residents to other places than it drew from them in the latest year.

Broward, Orange, Hillsborough, and Pinellas counties all shed domestic residents too.

The coasts got expensive.

A teacher priced out of Fort Lauderdale, a family staring down a doubled premium in Tampa, and a retiree done with Miami traffic all show up in that outflow.

Some point a truck up I-75 toward Tennessee and Georgia in the classic halfback move.

Others just cross the county line to somewhere cheaper.

The outflow, where it exists, comes from the priciest corners of the state.

Where the Movers Still Land

While the big coastal counties lose Floridians, the middle of the state keeps filling up.

Polk County, strung along I-4 between Tampa and Orlando, ranked in the nation's top five for domestic migration five years running, per that same University of Florida analysis.

Pasco and Marion counties kept growing too, as arrivals chased new subdivisions and smaller price tags.

Think Ocala, Lakeland, and The Villages.

The Villages keeps sprawling across three counties, and residents run errands by golf cart.

These towns stay affordable, and they're building fast.

Florida didn't empty out.

The growth moved inland, away from the coasts and toward the towns where a new house still pencils out.

What the Moving Trucks Say

One long-running study tracks Florida from the back of a moving truck.

Every January, United Van Lines puts out its National Movers Study, which tallies the direction of its own interstate moves from the year before.

For decades, Florida sat near the top of the inbound list.

Not anymore.

In its recent studies, United Van Lines files Florida as a balanced state, with about as many trucks pulling out as pulling in.

That's balanced, not fleeing.

New Jersey held the most-outbound spot, with roughly two-thirds of its moves heading out.

Florida didn't land on that outbound list at all.

A state losing everyone doesn't sit in the middle of the pack.

The Growth Engine Changed

The biggest shift in Florida's numbers is about who's arriving, not who's leaving.

Back in the 2023-to-2024 count, Florida gained 467,347 people, but only 63,346 of that came from other states.

The far larger piece, about 411,000, came from international migration.

People arrived from abroad.

Deaths slightly outnumbered births in Florida that year, so newcomers carried the whole gain.

The mix flipped.

Fewer of those international newcomers arrived in the newest year, and Florida's yearly gain shrank with them.

A Nationwide Cooldown

Florida's slowdown didn't happen on its own.

Growth cooled across the whole country last year, and the Census Bureau tied most of the drop to lower international migration.

Net international migration into the United States fell from about 2.7 million in one year to roughly 1.3 million the next.

That's a national story.