Virginia Population Trends

Every year the Demographics Research Group is asked to give presentations on Virginia’s demographic trends, and this year, as is true every year, the demographic trends we explored depended on our audience’s area of interest  —school enrollment change for the Board of Education, population growth trends for the House Appropriations Committee, or population projections for […]

Late last week the IRS released their annual migration flows data, which showed that more people are moving out of Virginia than into it for the fourth year in a row. Virginia’s recent shift into out-migration is notable because prior to 2013, the IRS had never recorded out-migration for Virginia since it first began publishing […]

Our recently released population projections for Virginia show that the total population is projected to expand to nearly 8.75 million residents by 2020 and to over 10 million residents by 2040. A large number of these people will be 65 or older. Virginia’s elderly population is anticipated to nearly double in size between 2010 and […]

Latest population projections show that Virginia will continue to grow steadily over time, and be home to more than 10 million people by 2040. The statewide growth rate is starting to slow down from 13% over 2000-2010 to a little over 9% between 2010-2020, which is consistent with trends observed at the national level. Comparing […]

Forecasting weather accurately is rarely possible but the public counts on exactly that – an accurate prediction. And the combination doesn’t always work out well as illustrated in the 2005 film, The Weather Man, when Nicholas Cage, who plays a meteorologist, sometimes gets the weather forecast wrong and is pelted with half-consumed fast food by […]

In December, the Census Bureau released its annual state population estimates, which showed that Virginia grew by 44,000 residents last year, its smallest numerical gain in population since the 1970s. The main cause of Virginia’s slower growth is that, for the past three years, more people have been leaving Virginia for other states than moving […]

No other age group experiences as much change within such as short period of time as young adults do. Until around age 18, the vast majority of children live with family and attend school. But then a great dispersion takes place, many young adults move away to attend college (69 percent of 2015 high school […]

Loudoun County, in Northern Virginia’s outer suburbs, was Virginia’s fastest growing locality in the 1990s and 2000s, nearly doubling its population each decade. Population growth in Loudoun, as in much of Virginia during the two decades was fueled by people moving out to newly built subdivisions on the edges of the commonwealth’s largest metro areas. […]

During the decades since the second World War, Virginia’s population has been one of the fastest growing among states on the east coast. Much of Virginia’s growth was fueled by an influx of migrants coming down the BosWash corridor from the Northeast into Virginia as well as from the Mid-West. In 1940, only 5 percent […]

Like many people, I’ve been inclined to explain Virginia’s decades of explosive population growth in terms of migration and the Federal government’s expansion in Northern Virginia.  While that’s certainly part of the equation, “natural increase” has actually driven most of the growth, just as it has across the country.  Natural increase simply means more people […]