We’ve collected all our coverage of Virginia’s population changes on our demographics page.
Something has happened over the past year.
I suppose lots of things have: the House of Delegates changed hands, Liberty University got invited to its first New Year’s Day Bowl game, Taylor Swift and her cat made the cover of Time magazine.
Some of those may be more important than others. Swifties and anti-Swifties may just dispute which ones.
Here’s something else that has happened: The number of people moving out of Virginia has slowed down.
Yes, you may recall recently that I reported on some Census Bureau data that showed net out-migration from Virginia was actually increasing. That was true then, but that data was also through 2022. A new round of census data dropped Tuesday and it shows that from July 1, 2022, to July 1, 2023, the out-migration trends almost did a U-turn.
This will be welcome news in the governor’s office; Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been focused on reversing the state’s out-migration trends. He’s not there yet but he’s getting closer (assuming, of course, that governors have anything to do with this at all). “If you leave out the 2020 domestic migration data, which is difficult to compare for a variety of reasons with other years, the 6,985 more people who left Virginia for other states than moved to Virginia in 2023 is the smallest deficit since the trend began a decade ago,” says Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, which helps compute the Virginia data that goes into the census report.
I realize this may be confusing — out-migration accelerating for one time period, slowing down for another. The Census Bureau pumps out data almost every week, sliced lots of different ways. This latest slicing suggests that whatever change has taken place started occurring either in late 2022 or early 2023. The important thing here is that this is the newest data and highlights some important demographic trends shaping the state and nation. Let’s walk through what we know.
Virginia’s population growth has ticked up slightly
This is important to remember when we talk about in-migration vs. out-migration. People moving in versus people moving out is just one part of population change. People being born versus people dying is another. Overall, Virginia has been gaining population even while experiencing net out-migration. That’s because births have outnumbered both deaths and that net out-migration. The new statistics released Tuesday show that Virginia’s population growth, which has been slow, remains slow, but has ticked up a bit.
From July 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021, Virginia’s population increased by 20,155.
From July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022, Virginia’s population increased by 26,264.
From July 1, 2022, to July 1, 2023, Virginia’s population increased by 36,599.
The state’s total population is now put at 8,715,698.
Now for some context:
The population is growing because deaths are down, post-pandemic
This is true not just for Virginia, but for the nation. From July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022, Virginia recorded 86,329 deaths. For the same period in 2022-2023, the number of deaths dropped to 79,980. The number of births declined slightly — from 96,018 to 95,559 — and international migration dropped, too. Still, it was that big decline in deaths that saw Virginia’s population grow a bit faster. The only thing different between Virginia and the rest of the nation is that the nation saw international immigration rates increase.
“U.S. migration returning to pre-pandemic levels and a drop in deaths are driving the nation’s growth,” Kristie Wilder, a demographer in the Population Division at the Census Bureau, said in a statement. “Although births declined, this was tempered by the near 9% decrease in deaths. Ultimately, fewer deaths paired with rebounding immigration resulted in the nation experiencing its largest population gain since 2018.”
Fewer people are moving — anywhere.
Virginia’s slowing out-migration isn’t unique to the Old Dominion, so it may not be related to any policies that have been enacted here. Domestic migration has slowed down almost everywhere, the Census Bureau says. In the previous reporting period (I’ll start using that phrase to avoid so many numbers), 19 states and the District of Columbia showed more people moving out than moving in. For the current reporting period, all 19 states and the district still showed net out-migration but those numbers had slowed in 17 of them. Only Michigan and Washington state have seen their net out-migration increase. Perhaps this is why Michigan has launched a $20 million marketing campaign encouraging people to move to the state.
Previous census data has shown that during the pandemic many people moved out of metro areas and into more rural ones. This latest report suggests (but doesn’t necessarily prove) that this so-called Zoom-era migration may be running its course. I say it doesn’t prove it because we might still see large population shifts within states; all we know here is that we’re seeing fewer population shifts across state lines. In a few weeks, we’ll get new population estimates for each county and city in Virginia. When we get those, we’ll have a better handle on where people are moving within the state, or whether high interest rates have slowed home changes, period.
For Virginia, here’s the important thing: In the previous reporting period, Virginia had a deficit of 23,952 people lost through net out-migration. For the most recent reporting period, that deficit fell to 6,985.
That’s a big change, one of the biggest percentage changes in the country. Virginia’s net out-migration is now just 29% of what it was. By contrast, Alaska’s outflows remain about 90% of what they were. Nebraska had the biggest drop, percentage-wise. Its net out-migration is now just 19% of what it had been.
With fewer people moving, population changes have smoothed out some. Some states that had seen large percentage increases — such as Arizona and Montana — are now seeing smaller ones. And some states that had been losing population are now seeing population increases; I’ll deal with those shortly.
Virginia and North Carolina remain a study in contrasts.
While Virginia continued to lose people to moving vans, the state to our south continues to gain them.
While Virginia was losing 23,952 to net out-migration in the previous period, North Carolina was gaining 99,796. While Virginia has lost another 6,985 for the current period, North Carolina gained 97,264.
While Virginia’s total population increase went from 21,751 in one reporting period to 36,599 in the next, North Carolina’s went from 128,865 to 139,526.
Why is Virginia losing people through net out-migration while North Carolina is gaining them through net in-migration? And why is North Carolina’s overall population growth so much faster than Virginia’s? We’ve examined this before, and will surely continue to do so. While this latest census report doesn’t have data at the local level, we know from previous data that the biggest population outflows in Virginia have come from Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads — and the Northern Virginia exodus is largely attributed to high housing costs. Youngkin and other Republicans like to point out how North Carolina has lower taxes than Virginia. How much of that explains the demographic differences between the two states? It would be interesting to see a more formal study of this — perhaps some curious legislator will propose that the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission take this on?
The South continues to drive the nation’s population growth.
This has been true for some time — the whole Sunbelt phenomenon — but here’s the latest data: 87% of the nation’s population growth is in the South. Texas and Florida added more new residents than any other states — 473,453 and 365,205 people, respectively. In percentage terms, the fastest-growing states are South Carolina and Florida, growing at 1.7% and 1.6%. (Virginia’s population growth rate was 0.4%.) Meanwhile, the states with the biggest population losses remain New York and California, with the former down 101,984 and the latter down 75,423.
That leads to an observation that I’ve often seen made: People are leaving liberal states for conservative ones. That’s partially true, but also the key word there may be partially. In the previous reporting period, 19 states lost population, but not all of them were liberal states. Alaska, Kansas, Louisiana and Mississippi certainly aren’t liberal, but they all lost population. In the current period, with fewer people moving, we saw fewer states lose population. This time only eight states lost population: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Those are generally, but not exclusively, Democratic states, but I continue to wonder how much politics are the driving factor compared to other things. How much does warm weather override low taxes? What other factors might be involved that we’re not considering? I’d love to see a study on that.
In any case, we saw the population losses in all those eight population-losing states decrease as deaths declined and fewer people moved.
Immigration accounts for most of Virginia’s population growth
Virginia’s population was up by 36,599. Of that, 28,117 were immigrants. That’s actually a smaller number of immigrants than in the previous reporting period. In that earlier period, Virginia’s population growth was solely due to immigration — that year, Virginia’s population went up by 26,254 but only because we had 37,692 immigrants.
Yes, I realize that immigration is one of the most hotly contested issues in the land. In a more perfect world, we’d be able to divorce the question of control of our border with Mexico from the demographic realities we face so that we could have a more dispassionate conversation about immigration. Donald Trump isn’t helping with this, what with his dark warnings about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the country,” a strange thing to say in a country that is peopled by the descendants of immigrants. The numerical reality is that if we’re to fill our labor shortage, we need more immigrants, not fewer. Who they should be and how they get in, that’s a good topic for debate, but the math remains unchanging — we have a worker shortage now, and we’re on a path toward losing population. We need only ask some rural localities in Virginia what population losses mean for their local economies. We ought to be asking that question on a national basis. Without immigration, 15 states that gained population would have lost population over the past year: Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Stay tuned for more demographic data. In the coming weeks, we should also get some new figures on how many remote workers we have — and where they are.