Recent Population Changes in US Metropolitan Areas —Gainers and Losers 2020–2024

Metropolitan growth comes with population loss between 2020 and 2024 in five of our largest metros

The metropolitan area of St. George, Utah (population 208,000 in 2024) with the Pine Valley Mountains in the background. Photo by St. George Chamber of Commerce on Wikipedia .

Between the 2010 Census and 2024 Census Bureau estimates, the total US population (excluding Puerto Rico) grew from 328.2 million people to 336.9 million. That’s a gain of about 8.7 million or 2.6%.

It’s as if the nation added another state the size of Virginia or Washington in just four years!

(A handy figure I think of to roughly remember the US population is 333 million.)

Almost all of this growth (95%) took place in the nation’s 387 officially designated Metropolitan Statistical Areas. (MSAs, but I’ll call them metros or cities.) The USA is truly a metropolitan nation. As of 2024, 87% of Americans live in these 387 metros. Instead of adding a new state, we can think of the nation’s population growth over four years as adding a massive new metropolis to our population — a Dallas or a Houston, each having around 8 million people.

On the chart below, we’ll take an overview of metro growth by looking first at the 25 largest metros where a lot of the population growth between 2020 and…