Neighboring Kaufman County Adds Over 11,000 Residents in One Year

Kaufman County, the expanse of North Texas directly east of Rockwall, added 11,100 net new residents between July 2023 and July 2024, a nearly 6 percent growth rate that ranked it the fastest-growing county in Texas and second-fastest in the nation. Anyone who has driven east on Interstate 20 through Forney in the past year already has the evidence in their windshield: framing lumber, concrete forms, and subdivision flags stretching to the horizon.

Census Bureau estimates confirm the county's total population now approaches 200,000, up from 145,310 at the 2020 count. That is a cumulative gain of more than 50,000 residents since the decade began, an increase of more than a third in four years. Forney, Kaufman County's largest city, absorbed the bulk of new construction along the I-20 corridor, with the McGregor area also drawing notable growth, according to a Dallas Business Journal analysis of the Census Bureau data.

Rockwall County has ranked alongside Kaufman at the top of Texas growth tables in recent census periods. The difference now is supply: Rockwall's land market is tightening and median home prices are climbing, nudging buyers and renters further east into Kaufman. Those residents typically keep their workplaces, doctors' offices, and retail habits on the Rockwall side of the county line, turning the I-20 and Highway 80 corridors into daily commuter pipelines that cross back west every morning.

Forney ISD carried more than 18,500 students as of June 2025 and projects enrollment could exceed 35,000 within a decade. That doubling is already reshaping attendance zones: the district redrew boundaries for the 2025-2026 school year as it works to distribute capacity across campuses that were never engineered for this volume. How those lines are drawn will determine which subdivisions feed which schools and, ultimately, which tax bases fund which facilities.

Infrastructure has lagged the rooftops. County roads have faced compounding wear from construction vehicles that arrive months before new residents do, grinding down pavement before any expanded tax base exists to fund repairs. Kaufman County voters passed a $50 million bond in 2019 to expand a courthouse that population had already overtaken, a cycle of reactive investment both counties have lived through before.

For Rockwall, the county that has already navigated its own surge and now watches 11,000-plus new neighbors settle next door each year, the more pressing question is how much of Kaufman's unmet infrastructure demand flows back west along those same two highways.