DFW population growth reached a point in 2026 where two datasets stopped agreeing with each other. One says the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is absorbing residents faster than almost anywhere in the United States. The other says builders are pulling back from precisely the counties doing the absorbing.

Both datasets are credible. Neither is wrong. The gap between them is where the opportunity sits — and where a badly built feasibility model quietly fails.

The two numbers that don’t line up

Collin County added 42,966 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, according to US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates. That is the second-highest numeric population increase of any county in the United States, behind only Harris County.

Over roughly the same window, HBW Building Activity data recorded 3,386 new residential construction permits in Collin County through the second quarter of 2026 — a 36% year-over-year decline, and the second consecutive annual drop.

More people arriving. Fewer homes being authorised.

A single year of divergence is noise. Two consecutive years of permit contraction against record in-migration is a structural signal, and it deserves more attention than it is currently getting from anyone underwriting North Texas land.

Where DFW population growth actually landed

The headline story about DFW is that the metro is booming. That is true at the metro level and misleading at every level below it.

Collin County: volume, driven almost entirely by migration

Collin’s 42,966 new residents lifted the county to just under 1.3 million people, a 3.4% annual increase. The composition matters more than the total: 83% of that increase came from people relocating into the county from elsewhere, with only 17% attributable to natural growth.

That distinction is the single most important input for anyone modelling absorption. Natural growth is slow, predictable and rate-insensitive. Migration-driven growth responds to mortgage rates, employer relocations and relative affordability — and it can reverse inside one cycle.

Kaufman County: the percentage leader

Kaufman County grew 5.67% in twelve months, from 198,010 to 209,235 residents. That ranked third nationally for percentage growth and first in Texas, tied with Waller County outside Houston.

Kaufman does not have Collin’s absolute volume. It has something arguably more useful to a developer: a steep, sustained growth rate on a smaller base, which means the marginal project moves the market rather than disappearing into it.

Dallas County: the number nobody expected

Dallas County lost population. Census estimates put the county at 2,661,397 residents, down from 2,664,013 — a net decline of 2,616 people, ranking among the largest numeric losses in the country.

The underlying flows are sharper than the net figure suggests. Dallas County shed more than 21,000 residents to outbound migration while gaining roughly 19,000 through other channels. The urban core of America’s fourth-largest metro contracted during a year in which the metro itself added more residents than anywhere except Houston.

Why the core is losing residents

The explanation is not complicated, and it shows up on every buyer’s spreadsheet.

The median home price across the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area sat at roughly $400,000 in May 2026, according to Texas Real Estate Research Center data. In Kaufman County, the median sale price over the three months ending May 2026 was approximately $304,000.

That is a gap of around $96,000 — roughly 24% of the metro median — for a comparable product type.

The standard objection is that these buyers are leaving the Dallas job market. The commuting data says otherwise. More than half of Kaufman County residents work outside the county, against a DFW-wide average of about 27%. Forney, the county’s fastest-growing city, sits 20 miles from downtown Dallas on US-80.

These households did not leave the employment base. They left the price per square foot and kept the commute.

DFW building permits are moving to a different county

Here is where site selection gets genuinely interesting.

While Collin County’s permit volume fell 36%, Ellis County recorded 1,103 permits through Q2 2026 — up roughly 11% year to date, following a 12% increase the previous year. Two consecutive years of expansion, running directly against the metro trend.

So the picture assembles like this:

• Dallas County — losing residents, minimal greenfield capacity, infill and vertical only
• Collin County — highest absolute in-migration, permits down two years running
• Kaufman County — fastest percentage growth in Texas, modest permit base
• Ellis County — permits accelerating two years running, growth strong but not the state leader

The permitting acceleration and the demographic acceleration are happening in different counties. Ellis is where the building is speeding up. Kaufman is where the population is expanding fastest. Those are not the same place, and the distance between them is roughly 40 miles of very different land basis.

What this means for feasibility and site selection

Three practical implications for anyone running numbers on North Texas.

First: stop underwriting the metro. DFW aggregate figures now conceal a core in decline and a collar in expansion. Any pro forma built on metro-level absorption assumptions is averaging a shrinking county with one growing at 5.67%. That average describes neither.

Second: separate migration growth from natural growth in your absorption model. An 83% migration share means Collin’s demand curve is far more rate-sensitive than a headline growth figure implies. Stress-test what happens to absorption if mortgage rates move 100 basis points against you, because that scenario hits migration-driven markets first and hardest.

Third: treat the permit-to-population gap as a screening tool, not a conclusion. Falling permits against rising population can mean an undersupplied market with room to run. It can equally mean entitlement bottlenecks, infrastructure limits, utility capacity constraints or municipal moratoria that will hit your schedule too. The gap tells you where to look. It does not tell you what you will find. That requires jurisdiction-level diligence before land is tied up.

A note on the data

Two cautions worth stating plainly, because these figures circulate in distorted form.

Population estimates cited here are US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 county estimates, released in March 2026, covering July 2024 to July 2025. Several widely shared figures for Collin County’s growth are considerably higher than the Census number; they typically come from multi-year aggregations presented as annual data.

Permit counts come from HBW Building Activity reporting, which tracks a narrower universe than the US Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey. Census BPS records substantially higher unit counts for the same counties. The two are not interchangeable, and comparing a figure from one against a figure from the other will produce a conclusion that falls apart on inspection.

The question worth asking

“Is DFW growing?” was answered years ago, and the answer is still yes.

The question that actually determines returns in 2026 is narrower: is the building happening where the people are landing, or one county over from it?

Right now the honest answer appears to be one county over. That is either a mispricing or a warning, and the difference between the two is a feasibility study.

Q&A

Q: Is Dallas-Fort Worth still growing in 2026? A: Yes, at the metro level. DFW added more residents than any US metro except Houston in the year ending July 2025. However, Dallas County itself lost 2,616 residents over the same period, meaning growth is concentrated entirely in the surrounding collar counties.

Q: Which DFW county is growing fastest? A: By percentage, Kaufman County, which grew 5.67% in twelve months to 209,235 residents — the fastest in Texas and third-fastest in the United States. By absolute numbers, Collin County, which added 42,966 residents.

Q: Why are DFW building permits falling if the population is rising? A: The decline is concentrated in Collin County, where permits fell 36% year over year in Q2 2026. Contributing factors include entitlement backlogs, land basis increases and builder caution after two soft years. Ellis County ran the opposite direction, up 11% year to date.

Q: How much cheaper is Kaufman County than the DFW metro average? A: Kaufman County’s median sale price was approximately $304,000 in the three months ending May 2026, against roughly $400,000 for the DFW-Arlington area — a gap of

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