The United States population grew last year at one of the slowest rates in its history, according to new numbers released on Tuesday from the Census Bureau. The immigration numbers plunged by more than 50 percent from the previous year, under the aggressive anti-immigration policies of President Trump.
The nation’s population increased by about 1.8 million over the year, and stood at 331.5 million on July 1, the estimates say. That is a growth rate of about 0.5 percent, the lowest since 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic caused deaths to soar and borders to close, shutting the door to international migration. That year saw the slowest growth since the nation’s founding.
The new census estimates measure changes in the population from June 30, 2024 to July 1, 2025, capturing the last months of the Biden administration, when it tightened border policies, and the early months of the Trump administration.
Over that time, net immigration added 1.26 million people to the U.S. population. That number is considerably lower than 2024, when under President Biden, immigration reached a record high of 2.73 million.
As Mr. Trump continues his term, immigration is expected to drop even further. If current trends continue, it will fall to about 321,000 for the year ending on June 30, according to a Census Bureau news release. That would be lower than during the pandemic year, when net international migration dropped to 376,000, one of the lowest points in modern history.
“I was expecting that the decline would be bigger than we’re seeing here,” said William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution. “This is still over a million people coming in.”
The Trump administration has pledged to bring down levels of illegal immigration and has carried out polarizing raids and deportations. But while net immigration has declined substantially, it has still not reached the point where more people are leaving the country than arriving.
“The basic goal here was to stop people coming over the border illegally and being released, and to ramp up interior enforcement to actually remove people,” Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy. “This is an indicator that much of the strategy is working.”
Though several estimates have been made of the immigrant population since President Trump came to office, the release by the Census Bureau on Tuesday is the first gold-standard set of federal figures to be released. They attempt to account for both legal and illegal immigration, as well as both deportations and voluntary departures.
Population growth is a measure of a nation’s demographic health, and takes account of births and deaths as well as immigration, emigration and deportation. The country needs a large enough population of young workers and taxpayers to be able to afford to care for the nation’s older residents, whose numbers are swelling as the Baby Boom generation retires.
A sharp drop in the birthrate also contributed to the slowdown in population growth. The birthrate has been falling since the Great Recession in 2008, and new births outpaced deaths by only about 518,000 in the latest period. That is higher than during the peak of the Covid pandemic, when deaths were soaring, but is still extremely low by historical standards.
“What has been carrying the United States through this decade has been immigration,” said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire. “My question is, what will happen to the population if we go to negative immigration?”
He noted that in the decade from 2010 to 2020, immigration made up about 40 percent of the overall population growth, while births supplied about 60 percent. But since 2020, as the birthrate has declined, immigration has comprised a larger and larger share, and now accounts for around 80 percent of overall growth.
While demographers expected the latest estimates to show a decline in the rate of population growth — the question was simply by how much — some of the changes seen at the state level were a surprise.
The Midwest was the only region where every state grew in population over the year: For the first time in a decade, more people in the United States moved to the region than left it. Ohio and Michigan both gained population, after losses in earlier years. South Carolina is the country’s fastest growing state, while Florida, which had recorded high rates of domestic inward migration, saw a sharp slowdown in the latest period.
The Census Bureau estimates are derived from government records, like birth and death certificates and data on immigration and refugees. This year, the bureau also included new sources of information, including government data from Mexico, to get a more accurate count of the number of people leaving the country.
While some demographers have praised these changes and said they will contribute to a more accurate count, they have also cautioned that it is difficult to precisely track immigration.
Jeff Adelson is a reporter on The Times’s data journalism team who specializes in using demographic data to explore social trends, population dynamics and the effects of policy.
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