Jacksonville Metro Area

The federal Jacksonville metropolitan statistical area is five Florida counties: Baker, Clay, Duval, Nassau and St. Johns.

That list is what the Census Bureau returns when its 2020 redistricting table is asked for every county inside the Jacksonville, FL Metro Area, coded 27260 (Census 2020 P1, counties in the Jacksonville metro). Duval is the core. The City of Jacksonville and Duval County have run as one government since Consolidation Day on October 1, 1968 (Jacksonville Sheriff's Office history), yet the Duval County elections office still links four separate municipal governments inside the county, Atlantic Beach, Baldwin, Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach (Duval County Supervisor of Elections).

The metro is a statistical unit, not a government. The Census Bureau explains that the general concept of a metropolitan area is that of a core area containing a substantial population nucleus, together with adjacent communities having a high degree of economic and social integration with that core. Under that concept, Baker, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns are counted with Duval because of how closely they are tied to the Jacksonville core, not because they share a government with it.

About 1.68 million people lived in the Jacksonville metro in the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 through 2024, and about 1.79 million by July 2025 if the five county estimates are added together.

The ACS five-year release puts the Jacksonville metro at 1,683,960 residents (ACS 2020-2024 DP05, Jacksonville metro). Duval County alone accounts for 1,023,153 of them (ACS 2020-2024 DP05, Duval County), about 61 percent of the metro's people, on 762.623 square miles of land out of roughly 3,202 for the five counties combined (2024 Census Gazetteer, Florida counties).

The four outer counties follow in a clear order. ACS 2020-2024 counts 306,934 people in St. Johns County, 227,584 in Clay County, 97,859 in Nassau County and 28,430 in Baker County. Baker is the rural edge of the Jacksonville region: 585.23 square miles of land, nearly as much as Clay, with about one eighth of Clay's population.

Sources for the table: Census 2010 P1 by county, Census 2020 P1 by county, the county ACS DP05 tables linked above, the Vintage 2025 county estimates file and the 2024 gazetteer. The metro totals for 2010 and 2020 are the Census Bureau's own (2010 metro total, 2020 metro total); the 2025 metro figure and the land area total are sums of the Jacksonville region's five county rows.

The Jacksonville metro grew from 1,345,596 people in the 2010 Census to 1,605,848 in 2020, a gain of 260,252 or about 19 percent.

Growth was uneven across the five counties. Duval added 131,304 people between the two counts, about 15 percent, while St. Johns went from 190,039 to 273,425, a gain of 83,386 or about 44 percent (Census 2010; Census 2020). Nassau grew about 23 percent, Clay about 14 percent and Baker about 4 percent, so the fastest growth in the Jacksonville region happened south of the Duval line rather than inside it.

The pattern held after 2020. In the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 county file, St. Johns added 16,233 residents from July 2020 to July 2021, then 14,293, 13,309, 12,380 and 12,994 in the following four years, reaching 346,328 on July 1, 2025 (Vintage 2025 county estimates; column order per the file layout). In the year to July 2025 the five Jacksonville metro counties gained 26,153 people between them, and St. Johns alone supplied 12,994 of that, nearly half. Duval's gain that year was 8,231, Nassau's 2,387, Clay's 2,315 and Baker's 226.

Most of the Jacksonville metro's recent growth comes from people moving in, though the mix of movers differs sharply between Duval and its neighbors.

The Census Bureau's components of change for July 2024 to July 2025 show St. Johns County with net domestic migration of 12,549, meaning far more people arrived from elsewhere in the United States than left, plus 460 net international arrivals and a natural increase, births minus deaths, of just 126 (Vintage 2025 county estimates). Duval looked different that year: natural increase of 3,315, net international migration of 4,753 and net domestic migration of only 101.

Nassau County, on the north side of the Jacksonville metro, recorded more deaths than births in that period, a natural change of minus 148, and grew only because of 2,578 net domestic arrivals. Clay County gained 1,977 domestic movers and 225 international movers. In short, Jacksonville's core county grows mainly through births and immigration, and the suburban counties grow through people relocating from other states and other Florida counties.

Across all five counties, the Jacksonville metro had a median age of 39.3 and a median household income of $79,643 in ACS 2020-2024 figures.

The same Census release shows 17.1 percent of Jacksonville metro residents aged 65 or older (ACS DP05, metro), and a median value of $343,400 for owner-occupied homes (ACS DP04, metro). Among adults 25 and older, 36.5 percent hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and civilian veterans make up 11.0 percent of the population 18 and older (ACS DP02, metro), compared with 10.3 percent in Duval County alone (ACS DP02, Duval).

St. Johns stands apart from the core. Its median age is 44.2 against 36.9 in Duval (DP05, St. Johns; DP05, Duval), its median household income is $109,839 against $71,277 (DP03, St. Johns; DP03, Duval), its median home value is $489,200 (DP04, St. Johns) and 50.9 percent of its adults have a bachelor's degree (DP02, St. Johns). Nassau is the oldest county in the Jacksonville metro, with a median age of 46.5 (DP05, Nassau).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted a Jacksonville metro civilian labor force of 848,100 and an unemployment rate of 4.8 percent in August 2026, both preliminary.

Total nonfarm jobs in the Jacksonville metro stood at 803,800 that month, also preliminary (BLS Economy at a Glance, Jacksonville). Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector in the BLS table for Jacksonville, with education and health services second.

The BLS figures cover the whole five-county Jacksonville area, so a job in a Clay County hospital or a St. Johns County resort counts the same as one in Downtown Jacksonville. Financial activities, at 67,800, was down 6.1 percent from a year earlier in the same preliminary August 2026 release, the steepest drop among the sectors shown.

No, the federal Jacksonville metro has five counties while the Northeast Florida Regional Council serves seven, adding Flagler and Putnam.

The council, based at the Jessie Ball DuPont Center on East Adams Street in Downtown Jacksonville, describes itself as proudly serving Baker, Clay, Duval, Flagler, Nassau, Putnam and St. Johns counties (Northeast Florida Regional Council). Neither Flagler nor Putnam appears in the Census Bureau's list of Jacksonville metro counties, so a Northeast Florida total and a Jacksonville metro total describe different territory and should not be compared directly.

The federal boundaries are not permanent either. The Census Bureau notes that current metropolitan delineations were announced by OMB effective July 2023, that standard metropolitan areas were first issued in 1949, and that the term metropolitan statistical area dates to 1983. The five-county Jacksonville definition reflects commuting and settlement as measured for the 2020 standards, and a future delineation could add or drop a county.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Census Bureau's 2010 and 2020 census tables, ACS 2020-2024 profiles, Vintage 2025 county file and 2024 gazetteer for the Jacksonville metro counties, the BLS Jacksonville labor page, and the Northeast Florida Regional Council home page.