Kentucky’s population increased to 4,588,372 in 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau said.
The state’s 0.8 percent increase was just shy of the nation’s 1 percent growth rate and a marked contrast to Kentucky’s population decline in 2021 at the height of pandemic restrictions, according to the annual population estimates.
Immigration in 2024 drove U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents. Immigration this year increased by almost 2.8 million people, partly because of a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84 percent of the nation’s 3.3 million-person increase between 2023 and 2024.
Births outnumbered deaths in the United States by almost 519,000 between 2023 and 2024, which was an improvement over the historic low of 146,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.
Immigration had a meaningful impact not only nationally but also for individual states, accounting for all the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population from residents moving out-of-state or from deaths outpacing births, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said in an email.
“While some of the surge may be attributed to border crossings of asylees and humanitarian migrants in an unusual year, these numbers also show how immigration can be an important contributor to population gains in a large swath of the nation that would otherwise be experiencing slow growth or declines,” Frey said.
As it has been throughout the 2020s, the South was the fastest-growing region in the United States in 2024, adding more new residents — 1.8 million people — than all the other regions combined. Texas added the most people with 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with an additional 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia had the nation’s fastest growth rate at 2.2 percent.
Three states — Mississippi, Vermont and West Virginia — lost population this year, though by tiny amounts ranging from 127 to 516 people.
The population estimates provide the official population counts each year between the once-a-decade census for the United States, the 50 states, counties and metro areas. The figures are used for distributing trillions of dollars in federal funding.
By the Associated Press and WKYT.com
