Census Data: South Population Booming

(Dreamstime)

The South’s population is booming, driving economic growth, with counties in Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia leading the way, new data shows.

According to the Census Bureau, counties in the South had a higher average population growth rate as of July 1, 2023, than the averages for counties in other regions last year.

Southern population growth is also driving economic growth in the region, Bloomberg reported.

The region grew faster, on average, in 2023 than it did in 2022, Census data on counties showed. About two-thirds of the South’s 1,422 counties saw their populations grow in 2023, while the year before, 59% of the region’s counties grew, Business Insider noted.

The growth the region saw for counties was larger than the previous year as well, with the 2023 average annual change in population at 0.56%, rising from 0.31% in 2022, the outlet noted.

And while the West saw its population growth among counties slow in 2023 based on the average percent change, the Midwest and the Northeast rate of growth rose, according ot the report.

Six of the top 10 fastest-growing counties with populations of at least 20,000 were in Texas, mostly near Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Counties outside Atlanta, in southern South Carolina (north of Savannah, Georgia) and outside Richmond, Virginia, also made the top 10 list.

“The South is the only region to have maintained population growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Census Bureau announced in December.

Nearly half of U.S. population growth since 1960 has happened in the South, in part due to the region’s high birth rate, according to a Bank of America report from December.

Southern cities are also booming.

“The population growth in Florida’s metro areas underscores a larger trend of widespread population growth across the South, the nation’s fastest-growing region and site of all of the top 10 fastest-growing U.S. metro areas from 2022 to 2023,” a Census Bureau post read. “The growth continued a pattern already clear the previous year when 8 of the 10 fastest-growing metro areas were in the South.”