New York City shrank by 12,196 people between July 2024 and July 2025. Charlotte, the nation’s 14th-largest city, added more residents than any other city in the country, and still ranked seventh in its own metro area by percentage growth.
Those two data points, side by side, tell the story buried inside the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 population estimates released May 14: the places gaining the most ground aren’t the big names. They’re the midsized suburbs surrounding them.
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“Big-city growth slowed significantly between 2024 and 2025, with some major hubs even seeing small declines,” said Matt Erickson, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. “In contrast, midsized cities found a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where domestic and international migration, paired with new housing, helped prevent the sluggish growth seen in small towns and larger metropolitan centers.”
For real estate agents and brokers tracking where demand is moving — and where housing inventory needs to follow — that Goldilocks zone is where the action is.
The largest cities took the hardest hits
The Census data tracks average population change in U.S. cities and towns by size, comparing 2023–2024 to 2024–2025. The pattern is consistent: every size category slowed, but the drop-off was steepest at the top.
Cities with populations above 250,000 averaged a numeric gain of 7,699 residents the prior year. That fell to 2,048 in the most recent period, a drop of more than 70 percent. Percentage growth in that tier fell from 0.9 percent to 0.3 percent.
The contrast with midsized cities, those between 5,000 and 49,999 residents, is sharp. That tier averaged 173 residents gained per city the prior year, and 121 in 2024–2025, a slowdown of about 30 percent. Their average percentage growth held at 0.7 percent, down only modestly from 1 percent.
That’s not immunity from the slowdown, but it’s relative resilience.
The same pattern held regionally. In the South, the largest cities saw average growth fall from 1.1 percent to 0.5 percent. Midsized Southern cities dropped from 1.6 percent to 1.2 percent, still the highest growth rate of any city-size or regional combination in the data. The Midwest showed similar divergence: large cities fell from 0.6 to 0.4 percent; midsized Midwest cities barely moved, from 0.6 to 0.5 percent.
Texas is still a growth engine
Eight of the nation’s 15 fastest-growing cities with populations over 20,000 are in Texas. Four of those eight are clustered in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro.
Celina, Texas, led the nation again with a 24.6 percent surge, reaching 64,427 residents. It also topped the charts in 2023. Fulshear, outside Houston, was close behind at 21 percent growth. Princeton, Melissa, and Anna — all Dallas exurbs — were also in the top five.
All five are what the Census categorizes as midsized or larger cities, with populations ranging from roughly 30,000 to 65,000. All are in markets where homebuilders have had room to move.
Charlotte led the nation in numeric growth, adding 20,731 residents, bringing its total to 964,784. Fort Worth was second with 19,512, and its population crossed 1 million for the first time, while San Antonio added 14,359 residents. The South claimed 11 of the 15 largest numeric gains in the country.
Austin, Texas, crossed the 1 million threshold during the period, joining a dozen U.S. cities with at least that many residents. Raleigh crossed 500,000, bringing the national count of cities that size to 39.
The outer ring is outrunning the core
The Charlotte story is worth a closer look. The city added more residents than anywhere else in the country in absolute terms and still couldn’t keep up with its own suburbs on a percentage basis.
The seven cities in the Charlotte metro that outpaced it in growth were all midsized, ranging from roughly 25,000 to 70,000 residents. Fort Mill, South Carolina, about 20 miles from downtown Charlotte, grew 6.8 percent to 38,673, ranking 20th nationally among cities with at least 20,000 residents.
The New York metro shows the same dynamic from the other direction. New York City lost 12,196 residents, the largest numeric decline in the nation. Meanwhile, four incorporated places in the metro’s outer reaches ranked among the country’s 200 fastest-growing cities by percentage change. Port Chester, New York, led that group, up 4.1 percent.
Buyers who can’t afford or don’t want the core city are moving to the outer ring.
If you build it, they will come
Population growth slowed nationally, but housing construction didn’t.
The nation’s housing stock reached 148.3 million units in 2025, an increase of 1.4 million units, a 1 percent gain, nearly identical to the year before. Over the five-year period from April 2020 to July 2025, total housing stock grew by 7.8 million units, or 5.5 percent.
Idaho logged the highest annual percentage increase in housing units for the fifth consecutive year, at 2.1 percent in 2024–2025. Arizona followed at 2 percent, South Carolina at 1.9 percent. The District of Columbia and New Jersey brought up the rear, each at 0.2 percent.
At the county level, Jasper County, South Carolina, led the nation in housing growth rate for the second straight year at 8.3 percent, nearly two full percentage points ahead of runner-up Dawson County, Georgia. Maricopa County, Arizona, topped the country in numeric gains for the second year running, adding roughly 42,000 units.
The places growing fastest in population are, almost without exception, the places that have been building most aggressively. The places that haven’t been building, such as New Jersey, D.C., and the coastal Northeast, are the places where residents are leaving.
What it means for real estate agents
The Census data reinforces a pattern that real estate agents in high-growth metros have been watching for a few years: Buyers aren’t just leaving cities for suburbs; they’re leaving large suburbs for smaller ones.
The outer ring of a major metro can offer proximity to employment, newer housing stock and lower price points, and that combination is proving durable even as the broader national growth rate cools.
For agents working the Dallas exurbs, the Charlotte outer ring, or the Phoenix suburbs, these numbers are confirmation. For agents anchored in the largest cities, particularly in the Northeast, the data is a quiet pressure: Population loss and sluggish housing growth make for a competitive market where listings and buyers are both harder to come by.
