Flagler County is again among the faster-growing counties in the nation, but not among the fastest. The county added 16,000 residents between 2020 and 2023, a 14 percent increase beginning to resemble the population surge of the early 2000s that was halted by the housing crash.
Put another way: the county has grown by a population equivalent to more than three times the size of Flagler Beach in that brief span. Just since 2010, the county has grown by 40,000 people.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2023 estimates of population released today, Flagler County had a population of 131,439 people as of last July 1, up from 115,372 at the time of the 2020 Census, and up from 126,758 just since July 1, 2022. The year-over-year increase of 3.7 percent places Flagler near the top end of the faster-growing counties in the state.
A disproportionate part of the population increase is driven by people 65 and over: in 2010, the proportion of the population that was 65 or over was 24.5 percent–at the time, 24,405 people. In 2023, that proportion had grown to 31.4 percent, or 41,300 people.
Conversely, the proportion of people who were younger than 18 in 2010 was 20 percent (or 19,000 people in that age category). In July 2023, the proportion of people younger than 18 had fallen to 16 percent, or 21,000 people. So while the number of people 65 and over has increased by nearly 17,000 since 2010, it has increase by only 2,000 people who are younger than 18. That explains why the school district’s traditional schools’ population has stagnated for a decade and a half, with an small uptick only this year: even with the slight increase in the school-age population, it has coincided with a migration from traditional schools to charter, private and home schooling, spurred in large part by the state’s increasing subsidies of private education at public expense.
Both Palm Coast Mayor David Alfin and County Commission Chair Andy Dance said the county and its cities need a healthier balance between older and younger people.
“That’s scary to me because it’s going in the wrong direction,” Alfin, who is himself in the older category, said of the demographic trend. “I have nothing against folks my age, but I recognize that I need people, residents here, who are my daughter’s age.” She tried to settle locally, but got a better offer elsewhere, he said. “If I don’t help turn the tide on an aging-only community, I don’t believe we will be financially sustainable for the long term, because we will tax people out of their houses to pay for an aging infrastructure, which as you know, is aging like our population.”
A stronger local job base would help turn that trend around, Dance said, as it would attract working-age residents with families. Palm Coast and the county are now primarily attracting retirees who are selling homes in the North, Midwest and Pacific zones (where many counties are losing population) and moving here.
“We’re in a great place to live, when you have a county like Flagler,” Dance said. “People definitely want to move to Florida, and when they look at where in Florida they want to move, Flagler has a lot to offer. There’s good points to be made about infrastructure. We’re seeing that debate now, with the recent city council debate on utilities, so it’s definitely front and center in our current discussions.” Along with infrastructure, Dance said, the county’s tree canopy and its natural resources have to be a priority if quality of life is to be maintained.
“I would first turn around and thank my predecessors all the way back, there’s only been three of them,” Alfin said, in reference to former mayors Milissa Holland, Jon Netts and Jim Canfield, “for building what has become a wonderful, appealing, high quality of life city for people to live and enjoy. There’s no question about it. It behooves City Council and myself to maintain that same quality of life moving into the future, because that’s what our residents demand and deserve.”
Alfin said the population numbers “force me between splitting my efforts in maintaining the beautiful city we have and keeping an eye on what the requirements for the future will be. So the workload becomes double from what my predecessors dealt with.” Palm Coast and Flagler County are both in the midst of rewriting their comprehensive plans, the blueprint for long-term planning and growth. Those plans are bound to take the rapid population increase into account–as well as demographic trends that continue to worry officials.
For all its rapid growth, Flagler County is not cracking the top-10 list the way it often did in the 2000s, when its population was much smaller, so increases translated into big percentage jumps.
The three fastest-growing counties in the country are in Texas–Rockwell, Liberty, Jackson–with growth between 5.7 and 7.6 percent. No Florida county appears among the topm10 fastest growing, though in terms of numeric growth, Polk County had the fifth-largest increase in population among the nation’s 3,100 counties, adding 30,000 people in one year, and now exceeding 818,000. Eight of the 10 other counties with the largest population increases were in Texas.
Nevertheless, four of the five fastest-growing metropolitan areas are in Florida, starting with The Villages, which grew by 4.7 percent between 2023 and 2024, then Lakeland-Winter Haven (3.8 percent), Ocala, and Port St. Lucie. Orlando-Kissimmee and Tampa-St., Petersburg were the fourth-largest gaining metro areas in population (Orlando added 54,916 people, Tampa added 52,000).
Flagler’s 3.7 percent growth ranks it among the top 10 fastest growing counties in the state. In comparison, the Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach metropolitan statistical area grew 7.9 percent since the 2020 Census, and 2.2 percent between 2022 and 2023.
Flagler County had a net domestic migration of 5,505 people in 2023 and 6,438 in 2022, suggesting a bit of a slowdown underway that Alfin and Dance attributed to different factors.
“If you look at the building permits from 2023 versus 2022, there are more than 20 percent less,” in 2023, Alfin said. “So fewer people arriving may simply be a function of fewer dwelling units available to house them right now.” He said builders and economists project that all housing under construction locally will be filled.
According to the Flagler County Association of Realtors’ January report, the median price of a house in the county was $380,000, only a few thousand down from its high in 2022, when it topped $400,000 briefly, while the total number of closed sales has decline for seven consecutive months. Houses ae taking longer to get to a contract (two months on average, up from fewer than 10 days two years ago), and the local housing inventory is near a four-year high, with over 1,000 single family houses listed.
“The growth is not as fast as it was post-pandemic, the higher interest rates have played a part,” Dance said, “and in talking to people in the construction industry, the growth has moderated, based first and foremost on the interest rates.”
