Data released by the Census Bureau suggests profound demographic changes ahead for the United States as the population ages and other longtime drivers of growth shift.
Here are four takeaways from the data.
An aging American population may be nearing a demographic tipping point.
When the 21st century began, the number of births in the United States regularly exceeded the number of deaths by between 1.6 and 1.9 million annually. This helped keep the country’s rate of growth relatively steady. Since then, however, the number of births in excess of deaths has declined by more than two-thirds and shows few signs of recovering.
Indeed, according to census data, there were just 518,585 more births than deaths in the one-year period ending July 1, 2025, a level that has remained largely unchanged since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. By contrast, when U.S. births peaked in 2007, births exceeded deaths by 1.9 million.
A pair of factors are converging to drive this change.
First, the number of deaths has risen as the massive postwar Baby Boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964, has reached its senior years.
The number of Baby Boomers peaked in 1999 at 79 million. By 2024, however, their number had fallen to 67 million, a decrease of nearly 28 percent. By the 2030 census, the Pew Research Center projects that the number of Baby Boomers will fall by a further 8 million people to just 59 million. While Baby Boomers were 37 percent of the U.S. population in 1964, they are just 20 percent of the population today — making them smaller now than both the subsequent Millennial and Gen Z generations and roughly the same size as the originally much smaller Gen X.
A second, but less well understood, reason for a slowdown in U.S. population growth is the striking, nearly two-decade decline in births that started around the Great Recession.
After peaking at an all-time high of 4.3 million births in 2007, the number of children born annually in the United States has steadily declined in the years since. According to the most recent census estimates, there were just 3.6 million births between July 2024 and July 2025 — a figure that has largely stayed constant since the end of the pandemic.
However, unlike rising deaths, which are largely associated with aging Baby Boomers, the decline in births in recent years is not driven in the main by generational changes — indeed, the oldest members of the large Millennial generation are only just beginning to move past their peak childbearing years. Rather, the decline has its roots in an unexpected decrease in birth rates.
The change has been dramatic. Between 1980 and 2007, birthrates in the United States were remarkably stable, fluctuating only slightly with economic conditions. But since then, they have fallen by almost 20 percent and remained there. The Centers for Disease Control now estimates that the average American woman of childbearing age will have just 1.6 children in her lifetime, a rate below replacement level.
The causes of this decline are complex and not fully understood by experts. However, while the causes may not be clear, its scale and scope are.
Some of the sharpest declines have been among teenagers. At the start of the 1990s, teen birthrates in the United States were significantly higher than other advanced economies. Since then, however, teen birthrates have fallen by nearly three-quarters, with the sharpest declines after 2007. Women in their twenties also saw a significant drop in birthrates post-2007.
While some demographic experts initially speculated the declining birthrates among younger women might simply reflect a decision by women to postpone having children until later in their lives, that does not seem to be the case, at least not yet. Birthrates among women in their 30s have remained largely static since 2007, and although birthrates did increase in that period for women in their 40s, that increase has not been nearly large enough to offset the decline among younger women.
There have also been significant changes in the birthrates of nonwhite women in this period, with a particularly sharp decline among Latinas. While Black and Latino Americans once had meaningfully higher birthrates than their white counterparts, the differences among the groups have substantially, if not wholly, converged. Indeed the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control shows that Black women are now having fewer children than white women.
Regardless of the cause, declining births are happening at the same time as deaths rise, pushing the country more quickly to the point where deaths begin to exceed births, something that has already happened in many advanced industrial countries in Europe and Asia.
Under long-term projections that the Census Bureau issued in 2023, deaths were expected to overtake births in the United States in 2038. But this assumed a continuation of immigration at more or less historic rates. If new immigration is close to zero or even negative, the United States will likely reach that tipping point even earlier in the coming decade.
The aging of the American population already is playing out at the state level. According to census data, 17 states — a third of the country — had more deaths than births in the one-year period that ended July 1, 2025. While some of these states nonetheless grew overall in population, this was only because of domestic in-migration and, more importantly, immigration from outside the United States.
By contrast, in the 2010s, only four states — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and West Virginia — consistently had more deaths than births, and in the 2000s, only one state, West Virginia, did.
The result is even more striking at the county level. While just 39 percent of American counties had more deaths than births as recently as 2010, the most recent census data shows that more than two-thirds now do.
With sharp falls in future immigration, the United States could be on track for record low growth this decade.
As the growth from births has fallen in the United States, immigration has come to play an increasingly large role in sustaining the country’s population growth. But immigration rates also have fallen markedly during the second Trump administration.
Data from the Census Bureau estimates that the United States saw 1.3 million immigrants during the one-year period ending July 1, 2025 — a decrease of more than 50 percent from highs during the Biden administration. But the bureau projects this number will fall further, by more than three-quarters, to just 321,000 between 2025 and 2026.
This would be the fewest number of immigrants in more than 60 years, other than 2020 when emergency pandemic restrictions temporarily closed U.S. borders. Moreover, the Census Bureau’s estimates may be optimistic. Some experts predict the number could be lower or even negative for the foreseeable future.
Even before recent shifts in immigration patterns, the population of the United States had been projected to grow only by 6 percent this decade, which would have been the slowest growth rate in the nation’s history. But at zero net immigration for the balance of the decade, the Brennan Center projects the country’s growth rate will be an even more modest 3.7 percent.
Put another way, at a 6 percent growth rate, the country had been expected to add roughly 20 million people this decade, reaching a population of 352 million people by time of the 2030 census. However, without further net immigration, the U.S. population is now projected to reach only 344 million by that point, or 7 million fewer people than once projected.
Most of that growth, moreover, has already happened. The United States added just over 10 million people in the first five years of this decade. Without immigration, projections are that it would add just another 3 million during the decade’s second half.
A decline in immigration this dramatic would be felt keenly at the state level. Five states lost population between 2024 and 2025. Without immigration in that period, 18 states, including nearly all states in the Northeast, would have.
Domestic migration patterns may be changing.
For many states, domestic in-migration (the movement of people from other states to a state) is also a major component of growth. This has been especially true for the fast-growing boom states of the South and Mountain West.
Overall, the Census Bureau’s new population estimates show that 18 states had more people move to other states than moved in the one-year period ending July 1, 2025. Northeastern states almost uniformly saw net out-migration, but some southern and mountain states also did. Perhaps the most notable state on this list is Colorado, which until recently was a net recipient of people from other parts of the United States and is now a net loser.
This trend is also playing out in regions within states. In recent years, the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Miami metro regions have all attracted significant in-migration from other parts of the country, making them the fastest growing regions in the country. But this trend may be changing. The most recent census data shows that domestic migration rates have fallen notably in the two big Texas metro areas and that more people are now leaving greater Miami for other parts of the country than are moving in.
