California’s Population Growth Resumes After Three-Year Decline
California’s population has increased for the first time since 2019, ending a three-year trend of decline. The state gained over 67,000 residents in 2023, a 0.17% increase, according to an estimate released by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration.
The increase stopped a three-year trend of population decline, which included the state’s first-ever year-over-year loss during the pivotal census year of 2020. The state estimates California now has more than 39.1 million residents.
The Newsom administration had blamed the previous decline on a combination of increased mortality rates during the coronavirus pandemic, a declining birth rate, and a slowdown in legal international immigration caused by the pandemic and stricter immigration rules during President Donald Trump’s administration.
However, critics pointed to a surge of people leaving California for other states, interpreting it as residents fed up with higher taxes, a larger homeless population, and a shortage of housing while Democrats have been in power. More people still left California in 2023 than moved here from other states, but it was far less than previous years.
In 2021, California lost a net 355,648 people because of domestic migration. In 2023, with the pandemic winding down and companies placing more emphasis on returning to in-office workspaces, 91,189 more people moved away from California than into the state. That number is much closer to pre-pandemic trends.
Growth from legal international immigration, which has been California’s growth engine for decades, rebounded with a net gain of 114,200 people in 2023, or almost back to the same level as before the pandemic.
California’s economy has shown signs of strain recently. The state is in the middle of back-to-back multi-billion dollar budget deficits because of declines in state tax revenue. California’s unemployment rate is 5.3%, which is above the national average and the highest of any state. And the state’s stalwart technology industry has been beset by layoffs as companies deal with a slowdown in investments.
Despite that, the population increased in 31 of California’s 58 counties, including nine of the 10 counties with populations over 1 million. Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous with more than 9 million residents, grew slightly by 0.05%, while nearby Orange County grew by 0.31%.
California’s population had been booming ever since it became a state in 1850 as a gold rush prompted a surge of people crossing the frontier to seek their fortune in the West. The state had notable surges following World War II fueled by a burgeoning aerospace industry and again in the 1980s and 90s with the technology boom in Silicon Valley. By 2019, California was threatening to break the 40 million population threshold. But that milestone never happened as the state began a period of population decline in 2020.
