The Palm Bay population explosion, 1960 to 2020

Palm Bay counted 2,808 people at the 1960 census. At the 2020 census it counted 119,760, more than 42 times as many, and it is the largest city in Brevard County.

Census by census

Year	Palm Bay	Melbourne	Titusville
1960	2,808	11,982	6,410
1970	6,927	40,236	30,515
1980	18,560	46,536	31,910
1990	62,632	59,646	39,394
2010	103,190	76,068	43,761
2020	119,760	84,678	48,789

The jump came in the 1980s. Palm Bay more than tripled between the 1980 and 1990 censuses, and in 1990, the City of Palm Bay’s timeline notes, it became the most populous city in the county, passing Melbourne. The city’s timeline puts it over 100,000 residents in 2006.

A fifth of the county

Palm Bay didn’t just grow; it grew faster than the county around it. In 1980 it held 18,560 of Brevard’s 272,959 people, about one in 15. By 1990 it was 62,632 of 398,978, about one in six. At the 2020 census it was 119,760 of 606,612, almost exactly one Brevard resident in five.

The town in the 1960s

Go back to the start of that climb and Palm Bay was a small place on the edge of someone else’s boom. A 1966 Florida State University study of NASA’s effect on Brevard lists it, with Palm Shores and Malabar, among the small towns of the county’s southern cluster around Melbourne and Eau Gallie, which together held the largest concentration of people in the county. The study’s survey of water and sewer systems couldn’t get figures from Port Malabar’s, because they were run privately by the General Development Corporation.

The study’s look at city budgets shows a town of very different habits from its neighbors. In 1963 Palm Bay was the only Brevard city where fines and forfeitures counted as a major source of revenue, used to offset the cost of the police department, and the only one where the franchise tax consistently brought in more than 10 percent of general revenue.

What came with it

The city’s timeline traces the institutions that followed the people: its first school, Palm Bay Elementary, in 1966; Fire Station 1 and Harris-Seybold’s purchase of Radiation, Inc., the company known today as Harris, in 1967; the first bank and motel in 1974; the first library in 1984; Palm Bay Community Hospital in 1992; and Harris’s $130 million Technology Center on Palm Bay Road in 2014.

General Development Corporation’s Port Malabar development is part of the city; the company’s story is on our GDC page.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon