This City Had The Largest Post Pandemic Population Jump

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 18, 4:36AM EDT · Published Apr 15, 10:16AM EDT

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This City Had The Largest Post Pandemic Population Jump — © benedek / E+ via Getty Images

Americans went through a great migration after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And, it has not ended.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans left large cities and moved to smaller ones. Among the reasons were people did not think large cities were safe as the virus continued to spread. (At this point the new BA.2.12 and BA.2.12.1 variants have caused another spike). And, as millions of Americans started to work from home, many became more mobile and able to live where they wanted to.

From March to November 2020, at the height of the pandemic, about 5% of Americans moved either permanently or temporarily, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. A full third of those people moved for financial reasons, 17% moved to be near family or a partner, and 14% moved to a place with a lower coronavirus risk.

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To identify America’s fastest-growing metro area during the pandemic, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed population change data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We ranked all U.S. metro areas on the percent change in residents from July 1, 2020 to July 1, 2021. The fastest-growing metros added anywhere from 1.5% to 5.1% during the pandemic.

The components of population change are net migration – the number of people who moved to a given metro area less the number of people who move out – and natural population change, which is the number of births less the number of deaths. (Due to margins of error in census estimates, the raw population change number is close to, but not precisely equal to, the sum of net migration and natural population change.)

The trend during the pandemic continued the longer-term of Americans moving to Sun Belt states, mostly from the Northeast to the South and the West. This was no different among the fastest growing metros.

The city with the largest post pandemic population increase was St. George, UT. Here are the details:

> Net population change, 2020-2021: +5.1% (+9,302 people)
> Net change from migration: +9,204 people
> Natural population change: +237
> Total population, 2021: 191,226

Click here to read Metro Areas With the Biggest Pandemic Population Increase

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.