Migration and New Residents — Palm Bay, Florida

About 11.2 percent of Palm Bay residents aged 1 and over lived in a different home one year earlier, in Census Bureau ACS 2020-2024 estimates, and 5.4 percent came from outside Brevard County.

The Palm Bay table S0701 counts 129,174 residents aged 1 and over and sorts them by where they lived a year before the survey: 5.8 percent moved within Brevard County, 1.6 percent came from another Florida county, 3.1 percent from another state and 0.7 percent from abroad (ACS S0701, Palm Bay city). Those four shares add to 11.2 percent (5.8 plus 1.6 plus 3.1 plus 0.7). The detailed Palm Bay table B07204 puts 114,707 residents in the same house as a year earlier, which is 88.8 percent of the city (114,707 divided by 129,174) (ACS B07204, Palm Bay city).

Palm Bay turns over more slowly than its county on every domestic measure. The Brevard County S0701 table gives 3.7 percent from another state and 2.1 percent from another Florida county, both above the Palm Bay shares, while the Florida S0701 table puts the statewide out-of-state share at 2.9 percent. The Palm Bay out-of-state figure carries a margin of error of 0.7 points and the county figure 0.3 points, so the gap between 3.1 and 3.7 percent sits close to the edge of the sampling error. The Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research reprints the same county shares in its Brevard County profile, listing 3.7 percent from a different county in another state.

Applied to the Palm Bay base, the out-of-state share alone means roughly 4,000 residents a year who lived in another state twelve months earlier (129,174 times 0.031 is 4,004), close to the B07204 count of 3,969. The City of Palm Bay describes itself as a city of about 88 square miles with a population approaching 150,000 (City of Palm Bay, Discover Palm Bay), a city figure rather than a Census count; the ACS rates on this page are five-year survey averages.

Of the 13,565 Palm Bay residents who lived in a different U.S. home a year earlier, 4,266 had moved within Palm Bay itself and 3,219 came from another place in Brevard County (ACS 2020-2024, table B07204).

The B07204 table separates a move inside Palm Bay city limits from a move into Palm Bay from another Brevard town (ACS B07204, Palm Bay city). Moves within Palm Bay make up 31.4 percent of all domestic moves into Palm Bay homes (4,266 divided by 13,565), with a margin of error of 1,065 people. The 3,219 movers from elsewhere in the county, plus or minus 740, lived a year earlier in another city, town or unincorporated area of Brevard County; the table does not name which one. The column definitions are in the B07204 variable list.

Adding the last three rows gives the newcomers who arrived in Palm Bay from outside Brevard County: 2,111 plus 3,969 plus 898, or 6,978 people, about 5.4 percent of the Palm Bay population aged 1 and over (6,978 divided by 129,174). In other words, a little over half of the people who moved into a Palm Bay home from elsewhere in the United States were already living in Brevard County (4,266 plus 3,219, or 7,485 of 13,565, about 55 percent), and a little under half came from farther away.

The local share matters for planning in Palm Bay. Moves inside the city and from neighboring Brevard communities do not add to the county population, while the out-of-county arrivals do. The B07204 estimate for moves from another Florida county into Palm Bay, 2,111 people, is smaller than the 3,969 from other states, so Palm Bay newcomers from beyond Brevard are more likely to come from out of state than from the rest of Florida.

The South sends the most out-of-state movers to Palm Bay, 1,957 of the 3,969 people who lived in another state a year earlier, followed by the Northeast with 1,048 (ACS 2020-2024, table B07204).

The Census Bureau sorts out-of-state movers into four regions, and the Palm Bay B07204 counts give the South 49.3 percent of the total (1,957 divided by 3,969), the Northeast 26.4 percent (1,048 divided by 3,969), the West 16.2 percent (642 divided by 3,969) and the Midwest 8.1 percent (322 divided by 3,969) (ACS B07204, Palm Bay city). The South region here means the other Southern states, since a move from elsewhere in Florida is counted separately.

These regional counts for Palm Bay are loosely measured. The West estimate of 642 has a margin of error of 545, so its true value could be close to 100 or above 1,100, and the South and Northeast ranges overlap. The ranking is a reasonable reading of the five-year survey for Palm Bay, but the exact shares should be read as approximate.

Arrivals from abroad are a separate group. B07204 counts 898 Palm Bay residents who lived in a foreign country a year earlier, plus 4 from U.S. Island Areas and none recorded from Puerto Rico (ACS B07204). The Palm Bay S0701 table shows 9.4 percent of non-citizen residents arrived from abroad within the year, against 0.7 percent of all Palm Bay residents (ACS S0701, Palm Bay).

Out-of-state movers to Palm Bay are younger than the city as a whole, with a median age of 27.1 years against 41.2 for all Palm Bay residents aged 1 and over (ACS 2020-2024, table S0701).

The Palm Bay median age for out-of-state movers carries a margin of error of 3.5 years (ACS S0701, Palm Bay city), so even at its upper bound it sits well below the city median. Brevard County shows the same pattern less sharply, with out-of-state movers at a median of 33.9 against 47.1 for the whole county (ACS S0701, Brevard County). Young children stand out in Palm Bay: 8.1 percent of residents aged 1 to 4 lived in another state a year earlier, and 4.5 percent of residents aged 18 to 24.

Palm Bay draws fewer retirees from other states than the county does. Only 2.0 percent of Palm Bay residents aged 65 to 74 moved in from another state, against 2.4 percent countywide, and the Palm Bay figure for those 75 and over is 1.0 percent. Black residents of Palm Bay are more likely than the county average to be recent out-of-state arrivals: 4.5 percent, plus or minus 2.2 points, compared with 2.8 percent across Brevard County.

Education and housing split the Palm Bay newcomers too. Among Palm Bay adults with a graduate or professional degree, 4.0 percent came from another state, against 1.9 percent of high school graduates. Renters in Palm Bay move far more often than owners, but mostly inside the county: 11.8 percent of residents in renter-occupied Palm Bay homes moved within Brevard County during the year, and 3.7 percent came from another state, compared with 2.9 percent of residents in owner-occupied homes. Out-of-state movers aged 15 and over in Palm Bay report a median income of $29,297, against $33,946 for all Palm Bay residents in that age group, in 2024 dollars (ACS S0701).

The share of Palm Bay residents arriving from another state barely moved, from 3.0 percent in ACS 2015-2019 to 3.1 percent in ACS 2020-2024, while moves within Brevard County fell from 7.8 to 5.8 percent.

The earlier Palm Bay S0701 table counted 110,867 residents aged 1 and over (ACS S0701 2015-2019, Palm Bay city), so the base grew by 18,307 people to 129,174 between the two survey periods (129,174 minus 110,867). The out-of-state rate held steady while that base grew, which means more out-of-state arrivals in absolute terms: about 3,326 a year in the earlier period (110,867 times 0.030) against about 4,004 in the later one.

The drop in local moves is the clearest change for Palm Bay. A fall from 7.8 percent, with a margin of error of 1.4 points, to 5.8 percent, with a margin of 1.0 point, is larger than the sampling error, so fewer Palm Bay households changed address within the county in the later period. Arrivals from abroad rose from 0.4 to 0.7 percent, each with a margin of 0.3 points, a change that is not statistically firm.

The ACS does not say why fewer Palm Bay residents moved within Brevard County. The figures show the rate of moves, not the reasons, and each five-year Palm Bay estimate pools survey responses across all five years.

Orange County is the largest single source of households moving into Brevard County, Palm Bay's home county, with 1,458 tax returns covering 2,345 people in the IRS 2022-2023 migration data.

The IRS migration files do not list origin counties for Palm Bay itself. The Internal Revenue Service publishes state-to-state and county-to-county flows built from individual income tax returns for calendar years 2022-2023 (IRS SOI migration data 2022-2023), and its smallest unit is the county, so the figures below describe Brevard County as a whole, the county that contains Palm Bay.

The workbook rows behind the table: Orange County, Broward County, Indian River County, Palm Beach County, Miami-Dade County, Los Angeles County, Suffolk County and Maricopa County. Beyond these, El Paso County, Colorado (110 returns) and Fairfax County, Virginia (106 returns) also appear among the larger out-of-state origins; the IRS data do not record why households moved to the county around Palm Bay.

In total, 20,374 returns covering 35,446 people moved into Brevard County in the 2022-2023 data, while 15,358 returns covering 25,148 people moved out. That leaves a net gain of 5,016 returns (20,374 minus 15,358) for the county Palm Bay sits in. Movers from other states filed 11,534 returns covering 20,511 people, and movers from elsewhere in Florida 8,564 returns covering 14,355 people; only 276 returns came from abroad.

Out-of-state arrivals to the Palm Bay area slowed from the year before. The 2021-2022 workbook shows 12,939 returns from other states moving into Brevard County, so the 2022-2023 figure of 11,534 is 1,405 lower (12,939 minus 11,534). Orange County also takes the most Brevard leavers, with 1,196 returns moving from Brevard to Orange in 2022-2023, against 1,458 coming the other way. Last verified: October 13, 2026, on the U.S. Census Bureau and IRS websites.