Every few years, someone you know announces they’re moving. Sometimes it’s for a job, or to be closer to family, or because rent got so high they did the math one night and couldn’t sleep after. What’s interesting, though, is when entire states start having that same quiet conversation at scale – when the numbers shift and people start moving out faster than they’re moving in.
That’s exactly what the latest population data shows. Between July 2024 and July 2025, all but five U.S. states grew in population. The states that saw a decline were California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont, and West Virginia. The rest of the country was still adding residents, but at a noticeably slower pace. U.S. population growth slowed to just 0.5% for that period, an increase of only 1.8 million people. The year before, the country had added 3.2 million.
The big reason for that national slowdown is immigration – or rather, much less of it than before. But the story inside each of the five declining states is different, and it’s worth understanding what’s actually happening on the ground, because cost of living, aging populations, and disappearing jobs are all doing different kinds of damage in different places. Here’s a look at each of the five states losing residents, followed by where Americans are actually moving to.
1. California
California is the most populous state in the country, and it’s also the one that lost the most people in raw numbers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates, the state’s population dropped by more than 9,000 between 2024 and 2025, the largest absolute decline of any state. That’s a fraction of its nearly 40 million residents, but the direction of travel matters – and California has now been losing residents on net for several years.
What makes this year different from previous ones is immigration. For a long time, California could absorb enormous domestic outflows because people kept arriving from abroad. In 2025, California experienced domestic outmigration of nearly 230,000 – similar to prior years – but net international migration declined so sharply that it could no longer offset those losses. Even positive natural change of around 109,000 wasn’t enough to keep the total from going negative.
The underlying driver of domestic outflows isn’t complicated. According to Evan White, executive director of the California Policy Lab, “there are tremendous problems with affordability in the state” – and research shows that people who leave are, in fact, improving their financial positions and are able to own homes in greater numbers after the move. A 2026 study by UC Berkeley’s California Policy Lab found that ex-Californians live in neighborhoods where the average monthly housing cost is about $1,706 – roughly $670 less than the $2,376 average in their old California neighborhoods. People leaving are also, on average, about 48% more likely to own a home after relocating.
Beyond housing, other factors are pushing people out: parts of the state are regularly devastated by wildfires and storms, there’s a persistent risk of earthquakes and drought, and some residents cite the visible homeless population or political environment as reasons to leave. Where are they going? Texas, Arizona, and Washington attract the largest raw numbers of former Californians, while Nevada has the highest per capita concentration of ex-California residents.
2. Hawaii
Hawaii’s situation looks a little like California’s in one key way – both states share a high cost of living burden – but Hawaii adds geographic isolation to the equation. Vermont led the decline percentage-wise at 0.3%, but Hawaii was close behind at 0.14%. In absolute numbers, Hawaii lost slightly more than 2,000 residents between 2024 and 2025.
Being an island chain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean makes everything more expensive by default. Goods have to be shipped in, which drives up grocery and fuel prices. Housing is scarce and expensive. Among all states, Hawaii experienced one of the largest rates of population loss due to people moving out to other states. And unlike California, Hawaii doesn’t have a massive international migration pipeline that can step in and compensate when domestic residents leave.
Between 2020 and 2025, Hawaii’s population declined by 1.26%, dropping from approximately 1.45 million to 1.43 million residents. That’s a meaningful shift for a small state. The combination of sky-high real estate, an economy heavily dependent on tourism, and the logistical reality of island life has been pushing residents – often younger working-age people who want more opportunity – toward the mainland.
3. New Mexico
New Mexico doesn’t fit the obvious mold. It isn’t a notoriously expensive state. It doesn’t have the kind of high-profile cost-of-living story that California does. And yet it still lost population. New Mexico’s population dropped by just over 1,000 residents in the year to July 2025.
The state’s challenge is more about what it lacks than what it charges. New Mexico shows signs of an aging population and has historically low in-migration – fewer people are choosing to move there than would be needed to offset those leaving. A stagnating economy and limited job prospects in growing industries have contributed to the state’s dwindling population.
In 2024, New Mexico was already falling near the bottom of national population growth rankings, a trend that continued into 2025. When younger workers don’t see a strong pipeline of opportunity in the place they grew up, the pattern tends to be the same everywhere: they leave. The state retains its enormous cultural richness and natural beauty, but neither of those things pays rent or secures a career path for a 28-year-old deciding where to build a life.
4. Vermont
Vermont had the steepest percentage decline of any state in the country during this period. The Census Bureau found a population decrease of about 1,800 residents – a drop of 0.29% year over year. For a small state, that’s a meaningful number.
Vermont’s challenge is partly structural and has been visible for years. In 2024, deaths exceeded births in Vermont – one of the states most significantly affected by this pattern of natural population decline. When you’re already losing more people to mortality than you’re gaining through births, you need immigration or domestic in-migration to make up the difference. Vermont gets relatively little of either.
The state is beautiful, famously livable, and politically engaged – but it’s also expensive relative to its wage base, small in scale, and geographically remote from major economic hubs. Remote work offered a brief reprieve during the pandemic, attracting a wave of city-dwellers who wanted to trade their apartments for acreage. That wave, however, has largely receded as companies have called workers back to offices. As one financial analyst noted, the shift away from remote work means job advancement options have grown more scarce in some states – and Vermont is a prime example of a place where that dynamic hits hardest.
5. West Virginia
West Virginia’s population story is the most long-running of any state in the country. Between 2015 and 2025, West Virginia’s population declined by 4.3%, during a period when the U.S. population as a whole grew by 6.2%. The state ranks 50th among all states in population growth over that decade. It declined by a further 1,300 residents between 2024 and 2025.
The core problem is what demographers call “natural population decline” – more deaths than births. West Virginia loses population due to negative natural change that is not offset enough by domestic or international migration. More than 20% of the state’s residents are aged 65 or older, and that proportion keeps growing as younger workers leave in search of opportunities that simply don’t exist at scale back home.
The workforce picture makes the demographic data feel even more concrete. The state’s labor force participation rate – the share of West Virginians actively working or seeking work – has remained between 53% and 55% for nearly two decades, consistently low compared to other states. The total size of West Virginia’s labor force has declined by nearly 30,000 workers since 2009, leaving fewer people available to fill open positions – a trend closely tied to the state’s population loss. As the coal industry has mechanized and shrunk, those regions have seen a continued loss of jobs and young people. That’s a cycle that’s hard to break: fewer young residents means fewer workers, which makes the state less attractive to new businesses, which gives younger residents fewer reasons to stay.
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Where Americans Are Actually Going
The flip side of this story is that the people leaving these five states are going somewhere. And the data on that is pretty clear. Growth remained concentrated in the Southeast and Mountain West. South Carolina’s population grew by nearly 80,000 residents in a single year – an increase of 1.5%, the highest rate of any state – fueled largely by domestic in-migration.
Idaho (1.4%) and North Carolina (1.3%) followed closely, with their growth also driven by people moving in from other states. Texas grew 1.2%, drawing from a combination of natural change and international migration despite a slowdown in the latter. In raw numbers, Texas gained the most residents of any state, with its population jumping by more than 391,000 to a cumulative 31.7 million.
Among counties, the fastest-growing were concentrated along the southeast coast, particularly in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Nine of the top ten fastest-growing counties in the country were in the South. The draw is consistent across those destinations: lower housing costs, warmer climates, growing job markets, and – for a significant chunk of people making the decision – the ability to actually afford buying a house.
The Midwest was the only region where every single state gained population between 2024 and 2025. The Midwest even recorded positive net domestic migration for the first time this decade, with states like Ohio – which had a net domestic migration of positive 11,926 in 2025, compared to a loss of 32,482 in 2021 – showing a notable reversal.
The Bigger Picture
Taken together, the population shifts happening across the country aren’t just a story about five struggling states. They reflect something more structural: the gap between where opportunity lives in America and where people can actually afford to live is widening, and people are quietly voting with their feet.
The national slowdown is “largely due to a historic decline in net international migration, which dropped from 2.7 million to 1.3 million in the period from July 2024 through June 2025,” according to Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for Estimates and Projections at the U.S. Census Bureau. If current trends continue, net international migration is projected to drop to approximately 321,000 by July 2026 – another decline of nearly one million. That’s going to make the math significantly harder for states that were already relying on international arrivals to offset the people choosing to leave.
For the five states losing residents, each situation is different. California and Hawaii are dealing with affordability crises that have been building for decades. Vermont and New Mexico are grappling with aging populations and limited economic pull. West Virginia faces all of that and more, in a state where the structural economic shifts of the last forty years have left deep marks. The reasons people move are always layered – a job offer, a new partner, a rent increase that finally crosses the line. But when those individual decisions start pointing consistently in the same direction, the data eventually tells a story. And right now, that story is: the South is growing, the Mountain West is growing, and a handful of states are watching their populations quietly slip.
What This Actually Means
Population numbers can feel abstract until you think about what they represent in practice. Every person counted in those declining totals is a decision – someone who weighed what they had in one place against what they hoped for somewhere else, and chose to go. Multiply that by tens of thousands and you get something that starts reshaping schools, tax bases, housing markets, and local politics in ways that take years to fully show up.
For the states losing residents, that feedback loop is the real concern. Fewer people means a smaller tax base, which strains public services, which makes the state slightly less appealing to the next person deciding whether to stay or go. It doesn’t have to spiral into crisis – plenty of mid-sized states have managed slow population loss without catastrophe – but it does demand honest reckoning with the conditions that are driving people out in the first place. Affordability, jobs, and aging infrastructure aren’t going to fix themselves.
For the states gaining people, the picture is rosier in the short term but not without its own pressures. The same domestic migrants flooding into South Carolina, North Carolina, and the Mountain West are driving up housing costs in places that used to be affordable precisely because they were overlooked. That gap between where you can afford to live and where opportunity exists has a way of following people around.
None of this is a verdict on any particular state. People are complicated, and so are the places they choose to build their lives. But if you’re watching these numbers and wondering what they mean – for your own city, your own state, your own calculation about where to be – the honest answer is that they mean this is still very much in motion. The map is being redrawn. It just happens slowly enough that most people miss it until they’re already somewhere new.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.