ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump's immigration policy contributed to a year-over-year decline in the country's growth rate, as the U.S. population reached nearly 342 million people in 2025, according to population estimates released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

The 0.5% growth rate for 2025 was a sharp drop from nearly 1% in 2024, which was the highest in two decades and was driven by immigration. Estimates for 2024 put the U.S. population at 340 million people.

Immigration increased by nearly 1.3 million people last year, compared with an increase of 2.8 million people in 2024. If trends continue, the increase in immigrants by mid-2026 will shrink to just 321,000 people, according to the Census Bureau, whose estimates do not distinguish between legal immigration and illegal.

In the last 125 years, the lowest growth rate was in 2021, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when the population grew by only 0.16%, or 522,000 people, and immigration increased by only 376,000 people due to restrictions on entering the country. . Before that, the lowest growth rate was just under 0.5% in 1919, at the height of the Spanish flu.

Births exceeded deaths last year by 519,000 people. Although higher than the pandemic-era low, the natural increase was dramatically smaller than in the 2000s, when it ranged between 1.6 million and 1.9 million people.

Lower immigration slows growth in many states

The drop in immigration affected growth in several states that have traditionally been magnets for immigrants.

California had a net population loss of 9,500 people in 2025, a drastic change from the previous year, when it gained 232,000 residents, although about the same number of Californians already living in the state moved away in both years. The difference was immigration, as the net number of immigrants moving to the state fell from 361,000 people in 2024 to 109,000 in 2025.

Florida had year-over-year declines in both immigrants and people moving from other states. That state, which has become more expensive in recent years due to rising property values and higher home insurance costs, had just 22,000 internal migrants in 2025, compared to 64,000 people in 2024, and the net number of migrants fell from more than 411,000 to 178,000 people.

New York added just 1,008 people in 2025, mainly because net immigrant migration fell from 207,000 people to 95,600 people.

South Carolina, Idaho and North Carolina had the highest year-on-year growth rates, ranging between 1.3% and 1.5%. Texas, Florida and North Carolina added the most people in absolute numbers. California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont and West Virginia all had population declines.

The South, which has been the growth powerhouse in the 2020s, continued to add more people than any other region, but the numbers fell from 1.7 million in 2024 to 1.1 million in 2025.

“Many of these states are going to show even less growth when we get to next year,” predicted Brookings demographer William Frey.

The effects of the immigration policy of Trump

Tuesday's data release comes as researchers have been trying to determine the effects of the second Trump administration's immigration policy. Trump made the surge of migrants at the southern border a central issue in his successful 2024 presidential campaign.

The numbers released Tuesday reflect the shift from July 2024 to July 2025, covering the end of President Joe Biden's Democratic administration and the first half of Trump's first year back in office.

The numbers capture a period that reflects the beginning of immigration raids in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, but not the later, in Chicago; New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee; and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The 2025 numbers were a striking divergence from 2024, when net international migration accounted for 84% of the nation's increase of 3.3 million people from the previous year. The increase in immigration two years ago was in part due to a new counting method that added people admitted for humanitarian reasons.

“They reflect recent trends we've seen in outward migration, where the number of people entering has decreased and the number of people leaving has increased,” Eric Jensen, a senior research scientist at the Census Bureau, said last week.

How Population Figures Are Calculated

Unlike the once-a-decade census, which determines how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets as well as the distribution of government funding, population estimates are calculated from government records and internal Census Bureau data.

The release of the 2025 population estimates was delayed by the federal government shutdown last fall and comes at a challenging time for the Census Bureau and other statistical agencies. The bureau, which is the largest statistical agency in the United States, lost about 15% of its workforce last year due to voluntary separations and layoffs that were part of cost-cutting efforts by the White House and its Department of Government Efficiency.

Other recent actions by the Trump administration, such as the firing of Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, have raised concerns about political interference in the agencies. But Frey insisted that office staff appear to have been “doing this job as usual without interference.” of AP with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.