Are People Still Moving to Orlando? New Driver's License Data Says Yes

By Brenden Rendo, Realtor · Updated August 19, 2026

Every few months someone tells me that everybody is leaving Florida. I hear it at open houses, I read it in the comments under my videos, and I heard it again last week. So I went and got the numbers, and not the statewide headline numbers that get passed around, but the county file that nobody local has published. Here is what actually happened in Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties in the first half of 2026.

Where this data comes from and why I trust it

When you move to Florida from another state, you are required to trade in your old driver license for a Florida one. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles records every one of those exchanges, including the state the license came from and the county the new resident registered in.

Florida Realtors Research builds the county-level cut of that file. I am a Florida Realtors member, so I requested it directly, and their research department sent back quarterly counts for Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties broken out by all 49 other states plus the District of Columbia, going back to the first quarter of 2016. Every number in this post comes out of that file.

Brad O'Connor, chief economist at Florida Realtors, explained why this series is worth watching even though it is not a census: "It is not as comprehensive as let's say what the Census Bureau might put out, but the reason why we use this is because it's in near real-time. We're going to be waiting at least a year and a half to two years before we're going to see Census or (Internal Revenue Service) data that is comparable. So for us, this is very valuable and it's tracked well with the migration data from those other sources."

That is the trade. U.S. Census migration data is more complete, and it also arrives roughly two years late. License exchanges arrive in weeks. If you are trying to price a house this fall, the fast series is the one that helps you.

The eleven-year shape nobody is showing you

The reason the statewide coverage of this data has felt confusing is that it usually compares 2026 to last year and stops there. One year of decline tells you nothing. Eleven years tells you everything. Here is every January through June total for the four counties combined:

Four straight years of decline from the 2022 peak. That part is real and I am not going to talk you out of it. But look at where the decline landed. The 2016 through 2019 first halves averaged 21,582 arrivals. This year came in at 22,968. We are not below normal. We are slightly above it, and we got here by giving back an unsustainable spike rather than by falling through the floor.

The statewide series tells the same story on a bigger canvas. First-half license exchanges statewide ran 171,423 in 2018 and 173,047 in 2019, spiked to 243,421 in 2022, and came in above 200,000 this year. Higher than any pre-pandemic first half, well off the peak.

County by county, including the Seminole number

This is the part that has not existed publicly. The statewide coverage published a top 25 county list, which captured Orange at number 4, Volusia at 14 and Lake at 21. Seminole fell below the cutoff, so all anyone could say was that it came in under 3,163. Now we know the actual figure.

Three things jump out of that table.

Orange County is a genuine national destination. 11,202 arrivals in six months puts it fourth among all 67 Florida counties, ahead of Broward, Lee, Duval and Pinellas. Only Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Hillsborough took in more. It is also running 12.5 percent above its own pre-pandemic pace, which is not what a market in retreat looks like. If you are watching inventory in the city, the Orange County zip code hub breaks it down block by block.

Lake County is the only one still growing. Up 2.7 percent year over year and 13.7 percent above its pre-pandemic average. Lake has been the affordability release valve for this metro for three years running, and the license data says people are still acting on that.

Seminole is the outlier, and it is my own backyard. My office sits in Winter Springs. Seminole is the one county of the four running below its pre-pandemic baseline, down 13.8 percent against its 2016 to 2019 average and down 26.8 percent from its 2022 peak. I am not going to spin that. Seminole has very little new construction relative to Orange and Lake, its median price sits above the metro, and when a market has neither new supply nor a price advantage, the incoming buyer often lands one county over. That is a real headwind for Seminole sellers, and it is the single most useful thing in this entire dataset if you own there. You can see current activity on the Seminole County zip code hub.

Where the new arrivals are coming from

The origin breakout is the part of this file that surprised me most. Here are the top origin states for the four counties combined, first half of 2026, with the change from the same period in 2025:

New York is still the engine, sending more people to these four counties than Georgia and New Jersey combined. But the long-haul, high-cost states are the ones falling fastest: Illinois down 19.6 percent, California down 11.5 percent, New Jersey down 11.3 percent. The states that grew are the closer, cheaper ones. Georgia is up 4.1 percent and Ohio is up 14.1 percent.

That shift matters more than the headline count. A buyer arriving from Illinois or California is usually selling a house first and landing here with cash or a large down payment. A buyer arriving from Georgia is more often financing near the local median. The mix moving toward shorter-haul, lower-equity moves is a quieter reason that the top of our price range has been slower than the middle.

The county-level origin patterns diverge in ways worth knowing if you are marketing a home:

• Orange: New York 1,522, Texas 784, New Jersey 763, Georgia 736, California 713. The most nationally diversified of the four.
• Seminole: New York 320, Georgia 188, California 181, Texas 174, New Jersey 166. New Jersey arrivals fell 36 percent year over year, the sharpest single drop anywhere in the file.
• Lake: New York 481, Pennsylvania 239, Georgia 207, New Jersey 194, Ohio 179. Ohio arrivals up 35 percent.
• Volusia: New York 597, Georgia 342, Pennsylvania 286, New Jersey 263, Ohio 229. The most Northeast-and-Midwest weighted, which fits the coastal retirement pattern.

What this means if you are buying or selling

If you are selling: demand did not disappear, so stop pricing like it did. Nearly 23,000 people arrived in six months. What changed is that there are fewer of them than in 2022 and they have more homes to choose from, which means the buyer sets the pace now. Homes priced to the current comparable sales still move. Homes priced to 2022 sit and then take a reduction anyway, usually for less than they would have gotten by pricing correctly on day one. If you want to see how often that is happening in your area right now, the county price reduction pages are updated weekly: Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia.

If you are buying: this is the most negotiating room you have had since 2019, and the data says the window is a normalization rather than a crash. Waiting for the arrivals to stop is a bet against an eleven-year pattern that has never broken except during a pandemic shutdown. Current metro inventory and days-on-market figures from the Orlando Regional Realtor Association back that up, and I keep the running local read on the Central Florida housing market hub.

What this data does not tell you

I would rather you trust the next thing I publish, so here are the limits of this file, plainly.

• It counts arrivals only. There is no matching record of people who left Florida, so none of these numbers are net migration. If departures rose faster than arrivals fell, the population picture would be worse than this file shows.
• It misses people who do not drive. Children, some seniors, and anyone who does not get a license are invisible here. Household moves are undercounted.
• It excludes international arrivals. Only transfers from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia are in this file, which matters a great deal in Central Florida.
• A license exchange is not a home purchase. Plenty of these arrivals rented. This series measures where people landed, not what they bought.
• The windows are not interchangeable. Every figure here is January through June. Florida Realtors also publishes full-year and through-September series with different totals. Comparing across those windows produces numbers that do not reconcile, so I have kept everything on the same first-half basis.
• Osceola is not included. Osceola County recorded 5,006 transfers and is a real part of the metro, but it is outside the four counties I work and track, so I have left it out of every total above rather than quietly folding it in.

Common questions

How many people moved to the Orlando area in the first half of 2026?
22,968 people traded an out-of-state driver license for one in Orange, Seminole, Lake or Volusia County between January and June 2026. That is down 3.0 percent from the 23,682 recorded in the same six months of 2025, and it is 6.4 percent above the 2016 to 2019 first-half average of 21,582.

Is migration to Central Florida slowing down?
It is slowing from an unusual high, not falling below normal. First-half transfers peaked at 29,156 in 2022 and have declined every year since, landing at 22,968 in 2026. That is 21.2 percent below the peak but still higher than any first half from 2016 through 2019.

How many people moved to Seminole County in the first half of 2026?
2,707. Seminole did not appear in the publicly reported top 25 counties, so this figure was obtained directly from Florida Realtors Research. Seminole is the one county of the four still running below its pre-pandemic first-half average of 3,140.

Which states are people moving to Orlando from?
New York leads by a wide margin with 2,920 license transfers into the four counties in the first half of 2026, followed by Georgia at 1,473, New Jersey at 1,386, Texas at 1,339 and California at 1,284.

What does driver license data not measure?
It counts arrivals only. It does not track anyone who left Florida, so it is not a net migration figure. It also misses people who do not drive, including children, and it does not capture arrivals from other countries.

Data source: out-of-state driver license exchanges reported to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, county and origin-state breakout produced by Florida Realtors Research, provided August 10, 2026. Statewide first-half figures and the top 25 county list as reported by USA TODAY NETWORK Florida, August 7, 2026.

Wondering what this means for your street rather than your county? I pull the last 60 days of closed sales in your subdivision and tell you what your home would realistically sell for today, including the price it would need to hit to compete with what is already sitting. Call or text me at 407-616-9019, or start with the home value estimator and I will follow up with the comparable sales behind the number.