According to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Texas’ population continues to boom.
The state has seen impressive population growth over the past few years and that trend appears to have continued in 2024, with the state adding more than half a million new residents – more than any other state.
State Demographer Lloyd Potter says both in-migration from other states and immigration to Texas from across the southern border are significant factors in the state’s growth. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What’s been driving this sustained population growth in Texas, to your knowledge?
Lloyd Potter: Well, I mean, Texas has been growing more than pretty much any other state for pretty much a decade. So we’ve been adding almost every year – over 400,000 in this last year. Adding more than 500,000 is certainly kind of keeping up with that, if not expanding it.
I was reading something online which said that some other states were growing faster than Texas nowadays, and maybe that was more per capita. I mean, you know, you’re looking at some smaller states. Are you seeing any changes there?
Actually, what you noted is there are some states growing faster. Their denominator tends to be smaller.
Utah and other smaller states tend to have a lot of people that are moving there. And so consequently, their percent growth is a little bit higher than Texas. But Texas is still up there in terms of the top fast growing states.
What about immigration? I know that there has been some change to the way that the data has been calculated by the Census Bureau. But what is that showing about the impact of migrants?
So certainly the Census Bureau has incorporated new data and they’re collecting data now on immigrants that are coming across the border and seeking refugee status. And that has resulted in there being a significant uptick in immigrants in Texas for this most recent year that they’ve done estimates.
Well, what parts of the state are seeing the most rapid growth? And I wonder if you have any theories on what accounts for it.
So certainly we see in what we refer to as the demographic or population triangle – with Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston as the points. Those are the areas that are growing the most significantly. And that’s not anything new. But certainly along the I-35 corridor from San Antonio all the way up to Oklahoma, pretty much we’re seeing very significant population growth.
The areas that seem to be growing the most significantly and fastest tend to be what we refer to as “suburban ring counties.” So, you know, in the Austin area, it would be like Williamson County and Hays County, and now Bastrop is kind of picking up in terms of its growth as well.
So certainly we’re seeing the most significant growth is in those kind of metro areas of the population triangle. And much of the growth that’s occurring there is happening as a function of net in-migration. So we’re seeing people moving into those areas largely because jobs are being created.
And again, historically, we have a good economy in Texas. We don’t have a state income tax. The cost of living has been better than many of the states that are sending. So Californian is in that as a big net sender and cost of living there, of course, is much higher than it is in Texas.
So those are factors that kind of draw people to Texas. And then when they move here, they tend to land in these counties that are surrounding the urban course.
Now, I know that there’s been a lot of discussion about urbanization, and you were talking about some of those ring counties. But shrinking populations in rural areas – does that continue? I know that there’s another narrative here that a lot of folks who’ve been living in big cities after the pandemic started looking out to more rural parts of Texas to perhaps plant new seeds.
Texas is big, both [in] population and geographically. And so when we look at West Texas and parts of East Texas and parts of South Texas, which tend to be rural, many of those counties are losing population. Much of the loss is a function of net out-domestic migration. So young people aging up through high school, then either go to college in the urbanized area or move there for work and then they don’t move back.
And then the net result of that is that we have an aging population in rural Texas and there are younger people who are no longer having babies. So you end up having in some of the counties what we refer to as natural decrease – more deaths than burst.
So that’s kind of this strange thing. Texas, we’ve got the most significant and fastest growing areas, and we also have areas that are losing population from net out-migration and more deaths than births.
Do you see any changes to these trends in the coming years?
Well, possibly. I mean, there are certainly some constraints. So water, electricity and transportation are probably the big ones. And those things conceivably could put a damper on new development and industry moving to Texas and so on.
