Disability — Sebastian, Florida

In the ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates, 5,044 of Sebastian's 26,233 civilian noninstitutionalized residents (19.2%) reported at least one disability.

The count appears in subject table S1810 for Sebastian city and again in the social profile DP02 for Sebastian, which splits the 5,044 into 264 residents under 18, 1,663 aged 18 to 64 and 3,117 aged 65 and over. These are survey self-reports, gathered by the American Community Survey and published as estimates.

The ACS builds disability status from six questions. The S1810 variable list names them as hearing difficulty, vision difficulty, cognitive difficulty, ambulatory difficulty, self-care difficulty and independent living difficulty. A Sebastian resident who reports any one of the six is counted once in the 5,044 total, and a resident who reports several appears under each type.

For a city the size of Sebastian, sampling error is real. S1810 attaches a margin of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points to the 19.2% rate and plus or minus 706 people to the 5,044 count, so the 90 percent confidence range for the Sebastian rate runs from 16.5% to 21.9% (19.2 minus and plus 2.7).

Sebastian's disability rate of 19.2% is above Indian River County's 17.6% and well above Florida's 13.7% in the ACS 2020-2024 estimates, mainly because Sebastian is older.

The county and state columns come from DP02 for Indian River County and DP02 for Florida. Within each age band the gap mostly closes: 32.3% of Sebastian residents aged 65 and over reported a disability, against 31.4% of older Floridians and 29.5% countywide.

Age mix explains the rest. Sebastian residents aged 65 and over number 9,636 of 26,233 in S1810, or 36.7% (9,636 divided by 26,233). Florida's 65 and over group is 4,678,989 of 22,080,419 in S1810 for Florida, or 21.2% (4,678,989 divided by 22,080,419). With a far larger share of older residents, Sebastian posts a higher overall rate even though its older residents report disability at about the state rate.

Working-age Sebastian residents sit close to the county rate and above the state rate. DP02 shows 12.5% of Sebastian residents aged 18 to 64 with a disability, against 12.7% in Indian River County and 10.2% in Florida, and 8.0% of Sebastian residents under 18, against 6.3% countywide and 5.1% statewide.

Disability rises steeply with age in Sebastian, from 10.9% of residents aged 5 to 17 to 23.3% of those 65 to 74 and 43.3% of those 75 and over in the ACS 2020-2024 estimates.

The 75 and over band is where Sebastian numbers are largest. Of 4,350 Sebastian residents in that band, 1,883 reported a disability, the biggest single group in the table, according to S1810. Another 1,234 of the 5,286 residents aged 65 to 74 reported one.

Sebastian's 65 to 74 rate of 23.3% is higher than Indian River County's 17.9% and Florida's 22.1%. Its 75 and over rate of 43.3% is close to the county's 42.1% and the state's 43.0%, and S1810 gives that 43.3% a margin of plus or minus 8.0 points.

Younger bands are small samples in Sebastian. The survey found no disability among the 880 Sebastian children under 5, while 264 of 2,433 residents aged 5 to 17 (10.9%) reported one, a rate with a margin of plus or minus 6.3 points. Among the 9,919 residents aged 35 to 64, 1,270 (12.8%) reported a disability, a lower rate than the county's 14.2%.

Ambulatory difficulty was the type Sebastian residents reported most often, at 2,805 people (11.1%), followed by independent living difficulty (1,696), hearing difficulty (1,690) and cognitive difficulty (1,489) in the ACS 2020-2024 estimates.

The percentages in the type table use different age bases, because table S1810 asks some questions only of certain ages. Independent living difficulty, for example, is reported only for Sebastian residents 18 and over, and cognitive, ambulatory and self-care difficulty start at age 5.

Hearing difficulty stands out against the state. Sebastian's 6.4% rate is close to Indian River County's 6.2% but well above Florida's 3.8%, and it is concentrated among older residents: 1,314 of the 1,690 Sebastian residents with a hearing difficulty were 65 or older, and 902 were 75 or older.

Ambulatory difficulty follows the same pattern. Among Sebastian residents 75 and over, 1,278 (29.4%) reported one, against 26.5% in Indian River County and 27.8% in Florida. Self-care difficulty was reported by 804 Sebastian residents (3.2%) and vision difficulty by 651 (2.5%), the least common type in the city.

The Sebastian disability rate moved from 18.4% in the ACS 2015-2019 estimates to 19.2% in 2020-2024, a change smaller than the 2.7-point margin on the newer figure.

The earlier figures are from S1810 for Sebastian, 2015-2019, which counted 4,618 Sebastian residents with a disability out of 25,071. The two windows share no survey years, so they form a fair before and after pair, but the overall shift of 0.8 points (19.2 minus 18.4) is within sampling error.

Some Sebastian lines moved more. Ambulatory difficulty among residents 75 and over rose from 865 people (21.1%) in 2015-2019 to 1,278 (29.4%) in 2020-2024, while cognitive difficulty in the same age band fell from 13.3% to 7.4%, though both shifts are within the combined margins of error of the two estimates. The 75 and over band itself grew from 4,092 to 4,350 residents over the same span.

Census QuickFacts for Sebastian city has published a narrower measure, residents with a disability under age 65, at 9.6% for the 2019-2023 vintage. That excludes the 65 and over group where most Sebastian disability is found, which is why it sits far below the all-ages 19.2%.

Among nearby places in the ACS 2020-2024 estimates, Micco reported the highest disability rate at 27.4% and Fellsmere the lowest at 6.4%, with Sebastian at 19.2%.

Micco counted 2,434 residents with a disability out of 8,896, with an ambulatory difficulty rate of 17.2%. Vero Lake Estates reported 15.3% and Vero Beach 14.4%. Fellsmere counted 315 residents with a disability out of 4,953.

By sex, S1810 shows 2,584 Sebastian males (20.0%) and 2,460 Sebastian females (18.5%) with a disability. The matching Indian River County rates were 18.7% and 16.6%, and Florida's were 13.7% for both.

Disability status also appears in the coverage table S2701 for Sebastian. Of the 5,044 Sebastian residents with a disability, 97.1% had health insurance coverage in the 2020-2024 estimates, compared with 85.5% of the 21,189 residents with no disability.