Palm Beach County Office: the median is mostly a size report

The town of Palm Beach posts a median office price of $1,148 per square foot. That figure comes off recorded, arm's-length deeds, so it is real. It is also sixteen sales, and I will not let it near a valuation anywhere else in this county.

Sixteen sales, one barrier island

Those sixteen transfers sit at the top of a ten-city office ladder for Palm Beach County. Second place is Delray Beach at $580 per foot off 50 sales. The distance from first to second is $568. The distance from second all the way down to the bottom of that ladder, Boca Raton at $291, is $289. When the top entry on a list sits farther from second place than second place sits from last place, it is not the top of the market. It is a different market.

Trophy property on a barrier island trades on scarcity and on who happens to want it in a given year. Sixteen deeds cannot average that away. One unusual transaction moves a sixteen-sale median by a hundred dollars a foot without anything changing in the underlying market. I publish the number because quietly deleting it would be dishonest. I refuse to price off it because sixteen is sixteen.

What 417 sales actually support

Across the county my dataset holds 417 arm's-length office transfers in 26 cities, 2021 through 2026. The median is $338 per square foot. The 25th percentile is $228 and the 75th is $528, so the middle half of the market spans a 2.32x range. The median building is 6,368 SF, built in 1984, and sold for $2,565,000.

For context, Broward office over the same window medians $277 off 362 sales and Miami-Dade medians $438 off 778. Palm Beach sits between them. That is the whole honest summary of where this county's office pricing lives, and it is worth less to you than it sounds.

The 2.31x that decides your number before you do

Sort those same 417 sales by building size and the county median stops looking like a benchmark and starts looking like an accident of which buildings traded:

• Under 2,500 SF: $513 per foot, 79 sales
• 2,500 to 10,000 SF: $380, 169 sales
• 10,000 to 25,000 SF: $288, 79 sales
• 25,000 to 50,000 SF: $315, 45 sales
• 50,000 SF and up: $222 per foot, 45 sales

Small office in Palm Beach County trades at 2.31 times the per-foot price of large office. Not 10 percent higher. Not 30 percent. More than double. The mistake I see owners make is taking a county median off a market report, applying it to a 40,000 SF building, and wondering why nobody bids. The $338 county figure is closest to buildings that are nowhere near 40,000 SF.

One honest wrinkle: the 25,000 to 50,000 band prices above the 10,000 to 25,000 band, $315 against $288. That is 45 sales versus 79 and I do not read it as a real inversion. The gradient from the small end to the large end is the durable finding. The middle of it is noisier than a clean line would suggest.

Notice also that the county's median office building, at 6,368 SF, falls inside the 2,500 to 10,000 band, which prices at $380. That is $42 above the county median of $338. The two numbers describe the same market and disagree, because one is a size-matched read and one is a mixed bag.

Reading the city ladder without fooling yourself

Boca Raton office medians $291 per foot off 51 sales. It is the bottom of the ten-city ladder. Delray Beach medians $580 off 50 sales, essentially the same count, and doubles it. I live and work in this part of the county and I still cannot tell you those two cities differ by 2x in office quality, because they do not.

The rest of the ladder: Palm Springs $371 off 15 sales, Jupiter $357 off 35, Palm Beach Gardens $348 off 23, West Palm Beach $314 off 101, Boynton Beach $312 off 26, Lake Worth $310 off 24, Royal Palm Beach $300 off 16. West Palm Beach is the deepest office market in the county by sale count and sits close to the middle of the range, which is what depth usually does to a median.

The ladder does not publish building size by city, so I am not going to claim I know each city's mix. What I will say is that a 2.31x size gradient is more than large enough to flip a city ranking on its own. Any read of Boca at $291 against Delray at $580 that does not start with size is a guess wearing a number.

Why the annual median swings a hundred dollars

Palm Beach County office medians by year of sale: $304 in 2021 off 99 sales, $328 in 2022 off 80, $424 in 2023 off 64, $318 in 2024 off 65, $347 in 2025 off 83, and $438 so far in 2026 off 26. Office did not appreciate 29 percent in 2023 and give back 25 percent in 2024. Nothing repriced that way.

What happened is that sixty-odd sales a year is not enough transactions to hold a size mix steady, and the size gradient is steep enough that the mix drives the median. The 2026 figure is a partial year on 26 sales and I would not build anything on it yet. Annual medians in a thin, size-stratified market are a mix report, not a price index.

The employment picture underneath the lease

Office pricing eventually answers to office jobs. In the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Delray Beach Metropolitan Division, BLS reported 697,300 payroll jobs for July 2026, preliminary and not seasonally adjusted, up 3,700 or 0.5 percent from July 2025 against 0.3 percent nationally. Inside that, professional and business services grew 0.4 percent and financial activities fell 1.9 percent. Those are the two sectors that sign office leases, and together they are flat to negative.

Unemployment in the division ran 4.8 percent, up from 4.1 percent a year earlier and above the 4.4 percent national rate per BLS. QCEW covered employment, the administrative count that payroll surveys get benchmarked against, was down 2,832 in March 2026 versus March 2025. The bright spots are real and they are about money rather than headcount: the average weekly wage was $1,784 in Q1 2026, up 7.1 percent against 3.9 percent nationally, and median household income was $84,789 in the 2024 ACS one-year estimate against $81,604 for the country.

Population grew by 1,578 people, one tenth of one percent, between July 2024 and July 2025 per the Census Bureau. That happened only because 14,302 international arrivals covered 11,953 net domestic departures. This is the wealthiest and steadiest of the three South Florida county economies and it is still not growing the way the marketing says.

How I price an office building here

I start with the size band, not the county median. I pull the comparable set from the same band and the same corridor, I check the sale count behind every median I quote, and I discount anything resting on fewer than about twenty transfers. Then I look at whether the professional and business services number supports the rent roll the pricing assumes.

If you own office in this county and want that read in writing, a broker opinion of value is where I would start. If you are on the other side of the table looking for space, that is office tenant representation, and the same size gradient works in your favor when you understand it before the landlord brings up the county average. The broader county picture across all three asset types is in my Palm Beach County market report.