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A post-pandemic resurgence in population growth that began in 2021 continued into 2023 and spread to more counties, fueled by people moving here from other states and countries, according to new Census Bureau estimates.
And statewide, most counties would be shrinking if not for the newcomers moving to the state.
Population growth slowed considerably in 2020 during the first year of the pandemic from mid-2020 to mid-2021, but Alamance County was among the few places it didn’t, showing a 1.17% growth rate from mid-2020 to mid-2022.
New estimates from the Census Bureau show that the growth rate remained steady over the following two years, at 1.52% in 2022 and 1.44% in 2023. Alamance County’s population grew by about 2,500 last year to nearly 179,200.
That’s a greater percentage growth than neighboring Guilford County’s 0.62% and Orange County’s 0.25%, and similar to Caswell County’s 1.68% but less Chatham County’s 2.11%.
On average, counties in the South experienced faster growth in 2023 than other regions of the U.S., the Census Bureau said. Across the South, the average annual change was 0.56%, up from 0.31% the prior year.
The new population estimates also show a continuation of most North Carolina counties seeing more deaths than births among their residents, matching a national trend.
Alamance, Guilford and Orange counties were among just 22 counties where births exceeded deaths from July 1, 2022, to July 1, 2023, though in Alamance it was a narrow difference at just 18 more births than deaths.
Caswell County had 163 more deaths than births, and Chatham had 139 more.
Yet only 16 of the 100 counties saw their populations shrink during that time because of in-migration from other places, and the state’s population grew by nearly 140,000, the new estimates said.
According to a report the Census Bureau issued in November, the states with the highest numbers of former residents who had moved to North Carolina the previous year were Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, New York, California and Georgia.
