Wis population grows again in 2025, but both state and US growth is slowing down

After some delay due to this Fall's government shutdown, we finally got new Census estimates for 2025 in this week, both for the nation and for individual states.

Overall, US population growth was nearly cut in half last year, largely due to the Trump/Stephen Miller Administration’s racism action against immigrants and immigration.

· Between July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025, the U.S. population grew by 1.8 million (or 0.5%) to reach 341.8 million.

· The U.S. population grew at a much slower rate between July 2024 and July 2025 than from 2023 to 2024 (when it increased by 1.0%, or 3.2 million people). The slowdown is largely due to lower levels of net international migration.

· Between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025, net international migration was 1.3 million, a notable drop from 2.7 million the year before (a decline of 53.8%). If current trends continue, net international migration is projected to be approximately 321,000 by July 2026, representing another decline of nearly 1 million since July 1, 2025.

Fun fact - you know which states had the highest growth from international migration in late ‘24-early ‘25? Florida (+178,674) and Texas (+167,475)! And immigrants accounted for over 90% of Florida’s population growth in the last year! So why isn’t TrumpWorld sending ICE all over those places…..?

While a lot of the trends of more Americans moving south continued in late 2024 and early 2025, I’ll note that our part of the country is also growing and attracting people from other parts of America. And we didn’t have our population growth drop off as much as other regions last year.

The Midwest was the only region where all states gained population from July 2024 to July 2025. In addition, after experiencing population decline in 2021 and small growth in 2022, the Midwest’s population grew solidly in 2023 (259,938), 2024 (386,231), and 2025 (244,385). Slight gains in natural change (births minus deaths) for some of the states in the Midwest contributed to their population growth.

“From July 2024 through June 2025, the Midwest also saw positive net domestic migration for the first time this decade,” said Marc Perry, senior demographer at the Census Bureau. “And while the net domestic migration was a relatively modest 16,000, this is still a notable turnaround from the substantial domestic migration losses in 2021 and 2022 of -175,000 or greater.”

Wisconsin was a part of this trend of positive domestic migration for 2025 (+6,984), and continued with to have its population go up overall (+15,619). However, we also had a slowdown in population growth, as that's lower than the 27,000+ we added in 2023 and 2024.

It places us in the bottom half of our Midwestern neighbors for growth, although we were not a huge laggard for the region as a whole. (I define the “Midwest” as the 7 states of the pre-1993 Big Ten. The Census Bureau may define it a bit differently and widely).

Since the last Census in 2020, Wisconsin has added 78,464 to our population (+1.33%), a number that places us smack dab in the middle for the Midwest, both in terms of amount and rate.

Change in population 2020-2025
Ind. +186,728
Minn +123,742
Ohio +101,065
Wis. +78,464
Mich +48,522
Iowa +47,805
Ill. -102,600

% Change in population 2020-2025
Ind. +2.75%
Minn +2.17%
Iowa +1.50%
Wis. +1.33%
Ohio +0.86%
Mich +0.48%
Ill. -0.80%

I'll take the positive net migration and overall population growth as good signs for this state, especially as we go through a week where the temperature has been below zero every night and the high temps haven't gotten above 15. And if we keep on adding 15,000-27,000 people a year, as we have in the last 4 years, we will break 6 million for total population by 2027.

Nationally, we can see where the Trumpian limitations on immigration was already having an effect on the country's population growth by mid-2025, and that's going to limit the amount of job and consumer spending growth that we can get (conversely, it also explains why our tiny job growth might not spike unemployment as much as it would have before 2025). So one of the big engines of our surprisingly large post-COVID job and GDP growth is going away, and once the Bubbles pop, it doesn't seem like there will be much on the demographic side to make up for it.