Collier County added 409 residents in a year, Census estimates show, as Southwest Florida apartment vacancy reached a 17 year high

The Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 county estimates put Collier County at 417,131 residents on July 1, 2025. That is 409 more than a year earlier, a gain of about one tenth of one percent, and the smallest annual increase in the current estimate series, which runs from the April 2020 census base.

The four preceding years looked nothing like it. Collier added 10,084 residents in the year to July 2021, then 14,075, then 9,949, then 5,287. The 2025 gain is 92 percent below the 2024 gain.

The components of change show where the growth went. Collier recorded 3,556 births against 4,181 deaths, a natural change of minus 625, which has been negative in every year of the series for a county with this age structure. International migration added 3,432 people, down from 6,423 a year earlier. Domestic migration subtracted 2,337, against minus 287 the year before. A residual adjustment of minus 61 closes the total.

Lee County did not follow. Lee reached 875,607 residents, a gain of 13,940, and its domestic migration rose to a positive 8,603 from a positive 4,754. Its international migration fell by roughly half, to 5,912 from 11,463, moving the same way as Collier's. Charlotte County reached 217,212, a gain of 5,756.

Set that against the rental market. First reported by David Dorsey at Gulfshore Business, apartment vacancy across Southwest Florida entered 2026 at 20.3 percent in Lee County, 13.8 percent in Collier and 19.5 percent in Charlotte, the highest readings in 17 years for Lee and Collier, on CoStar figures pulled by Nelson Taylor, vice president of market research at LSI Companies. Five years earlier the same three counties stood at 6.3 percent, 3.7 percent and 4.2 percent.

The supply side is in the same report. Lee County completed a record 4,330 apartment units in 2025, up 17 percent on the 3,696 of 2024, which was itself 82 percent above the 2,031 finished in 2023. Collier completed 982 units in 2025, against 878 in 2024 and 496 in 2023. A survey by Mayhugh Commercial Group in Fort Myers, cited in the same report, put the average monthly rent across unit types at about $2,209.60 this year against $2,858.07 in 2023, a fall of 22.7 percent.

The two data sets do not line up cleanly, and the difference matters. The Census year runs July to July and counts people. The completions are calendar years and count units. Neither series causes the other, and the developers quoted in the Gulfshore Business report attribute the vacancy to a construction surge that will taper rather than to a failure of demand. Joe Bonora of Catalyst Development, quoted there, also cautions that a blended vacancy rate mixes newly opened buildings still filling up with stabilized complexes running near capacity.

What the county estimates add is the other half of the arithmetic, and it has not been placed next to the vacancy figures before. Collier delivered 2,356 apartment units across 2023, 2024 and 2025. Measured over the three estimate years ending in July 2025, the county added 15,645 people, and almost none of that arrived in the final year.

The estimates and the components of change are published by the Census Bureau in the CO-EST2025-ALLDATA file linked below. The vacancy rates, the completion counts and the rent survey are not public documents, and they are reported here as Gulfshore Business reported them.