Texas’ gain in population from people moving in from other states has sunk to its lowest level in two decades, according to estimates that the Census Bureau released this week, indicating a sharp slowdown in the state’s once-rapid growth.
Net domestic migration into Texas has fallen for three straight years, and totaled around 67,000 in the 12 months ending in June 2025, a level lower than any seen since early 2005. The comparable figure three years earlier was nearly 219,000.
The state still attracts far more new residents than most other states do, at a time when places like California and New York are losing them.
But the new census estimates indicate that after years of strong inward migration from other states — which helped fuel the expansion of major Texas cities like Houston, Dallas and Austin — that growth has slowed considerably.
“It’s so different from what we’re used to,” said Bill King, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston who has been following the state’s demographic trends. “It’s just so foreign to our psyche.”
The slowdown was more pronounced in Texas than in any other state except for Florida, where growth has also slowed sharply.
After two years in the top spot, Texas fell to second place for net inward domestic migration, behind North Carolina, where people moving in exceeded people moving out by more than 84,000 in the 12 months ending in June 2025, the Census Bureau estimates. Many considerations go into why Americans choose to move across state lines, including job opportunities, improved quality of life and more housing options. Texas has been drawing new residents in search of larger homes, work opportunities and a lower cost of living for quite some time. But there are signs that some of those advantages have diminished.
“Job creation is slowing down,” said Vance Ginn, an economic consultant based in Texas and a former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget during President Trump’s first term. Housing affordability has also become an issue, he said, in part because of high property taxes.
“Texas has rested on its laurels for too long,” Mr. Ginn said.
Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer and a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said that domestic migration patterns suggest that “the pull factors for Texas aren’t quite as strong as they have been.” Even so, though the numbers may lead people to think that Texas isn’t “hot” anymore, he said, “it’s still hotter than most places.”
From 2022 through 2024, the declining numbers of people moving to Texas from other states was obscured by a sharp rise in the number of immigrants arriving from abroad, fueling the state’s explosive population growth.
But for the most recent 12-month period, through June 2025, the slowdown in domestic migration to Texas occurred alongside an even sharper reduction in immigration, which added only about 167,500 people to Texas’ population last year — less than half as many as the year before.
That mirrors a plunge in immigration nationwide. Net immigration to the country reached record highs after the easing of pandemic restrictions, and peaked at 2.7 million in the 12 months ending in June 2024. But that was followed by a border crackdown late in President Joseph R. Biden’s term, and then by President Trump’s aggressive policies to restrict legal immigration and deport unauthorized residents.
Together, these policies drove net immigration figures down to less than 1.3 million nationwide, which helped make the period from July 1, 2024 to July 1, 2025 one of the slowest for growth in the nation’s history, according to the census estimates. The Census Bureau projects that the net immigration figure could fall to 321,000 this year in the U.S., which is less than the number of new international residents gained just by Texas in the comparable period ending in 2024.
Though migration patterns can fluctuate from year to year, the story of Texas has long been one of growth. Domestic migration to the state has remained high since late 2005, when Hurricane Katrina led to an influx of residents displaced from other affected states by the storm. The Covid-19 pandemic created another surge of interstate migration to Texas.
The new census estimates do not break down how many people moved to Texas and how many left. Previous surveys suggest that the drop-off is primarily driven by declines in the inflow of new residents, rather than a surge of people leaving. Arrivals from other states fell by more than 17 percent from 2022 to 2024, while departures stayed relatively stable.
Mr. King said that the trend had started to be evident in local statistics, like a flattening in the revenue from some toll roads. “We’re in a situation where it’s going to be a very level kind of trajectory going forward,” he said.
That could have some benefits for the state, which has struggled in recent years to keep pace with a surge of new residents crowding roads, schools and neighborhoods, said Mr. Potter, the state demographer. “I’m of the opinion that lower migration is probably a good thing.”
The dwindling number of people moving to Texas also mirrors a slowdown across the South, which had been attracting hundreds of thousands of new residents every year for decades. As with Texas, the region as a whole has seen slower growth since the waning of the pandemic.
Florida has seen an even steeper drop-off than Texas has. Only about 22,500 more people moved in to Florida from other states than moved out in the most recent 12-month period, down 93 percent from three years earlier, according to the census estimates.
At the same time. the Midwest, whose population had been steadily dwindling, saw more people from other states move in than out in the twelve months ending in June 2025 — the first time that has happened in more than two decades.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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