What the Census Bureau's latest release says about US growth in 2026

The US Census Bureau released its Vintage 2025 subcounty population estimates on 14 May 2026. For a marketing team, this is the closest thing to an annual update on where the country is actually growing.

The picture is uneven. National growth slowed between July 2024 and July 2025, but midsized cities and the outer edges of major metros kept growing faster.

What is in the release

The Vintage 2025 estimates cover every city, town, and metropolitan area in the United States, updated as of 1 July 2025. The headline numbers:

• Charlotte, North Carolina, gained the most people of any city in the country: 20,731 new residents.
• Celina, Texas, on the northern fringe of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, was the fastest-growing city with at least 20,000 residents at 24.6% annual growth.
• Austin crossed the one-million mark, joining a dozen other US cities at that scale.
• The national housing stock reached 148.3 million units, up 1.4 million from 2024.
• New York City lost 12,196 residents, the largest absolute decline in the country.

These are not survey estimates. They are the Census Bureau's official annual snapshot, used by federal agencies, banks, and large retailers to plan rollouts. For a primer on how this release sits alongside the rest of US public data, the foundational piece on the blog covers the ground.

Three patterns worth a marketing team's attention

1. The Dallas-Fort Worth exurbs are the story of the year

Dallas-Fort Worth grew 11.0% from 2020 to 2025 to a metro population of 8.5 million. The growth is not evenly spread inside the metro. Dallas, the city, grew 1.9% across that five-year window. Fort Worth grew 11.9%. Out on the northern edge of Collin County, Celina grew 276.8%. That is not a typo. A small Texas town became a small city in five years. In the most recent single year alone, Celina grew 24.6%, Princeton 18.1% and Anna 10.2%, three of the five fastest-growing US cities with at least 20,000 residents, all in the same county. For a brand running a regional campaign in Texas, the audience lives further north than it did five years ago.

2. New York is a study in two directions at once

The New York-Newark-Jersey City metro grew 0.1% across the five-year window. At the same time, it lost nearly 1.3 million people to other parts of the country through internal migration. International arrivals and natural increase filled in most of the gap. New York City itself declined 2.5% over the same five years. For a marketing team running a New York buy, a flat headline population can mask a near-complete turnover in who lives there. The composition shifts that come with replacing more than a million domestic movers with new arrivals show up in the American Community Survey alongside this release.

3. Seattle is the exception worth understanding

The Seattle metro grew 3.6%, but Seattle, the city, grew 6.5%. That is the opposite of the national pattern, where suburbs and exurbs are growing faster than city cores. Seattle's growth is in the centre. Two cities in the same country can be growing in opposite shapes, and that has real consequences for media buys, store rollouts, and out-of-home plans.

What this changes for a marketing plan

Three uses come up the moment this release is on the table:

• Regional rollouts. If a campaign is being planned around a metro the way it looked in 2020, the underlying population has shifted enough to be worth re-checking. Houses, schools, and households have moved from city cores to exurban edges in measurable numbers.
• Out-of-home and local media. Inventory in a city core that has lost population is not the same buy it was three years ago. Inventory on the exurban edges may now reach the audience the campaign was written for.
• National vs regional planning. National averages disguise a great deal. A 0.1% national growth figure is not the right input to a media plan for any specific metro. The subcounty data is the input.

These are the same kinds of questions the cohort demographics work answers from the Census Bureau's other annual release, the American Community Survey. The two releases sit alongside each other in the same agency's calendar, and they cover different cuts of the same underlying population.

How to use the data this week

Start with one question. Pick the metro a campaign is currently running in. Pull the Vintage 2025 subcounty estimates for that metro and compare the 2025 population of the central city to the surrounding places that gained the most residents. If the surrounding places have grown faster, the people the campaign is meant to reach may not live where the brief assumes.

For a related Cambium AI piece on how housing affordability varies across these same county-level boundaries, the national affordability rankings show how the cost picture maps onto the growth picture. Where places grow, housing stress tends to follow a year or two behind.

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Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates, press release CB26-80, released 14 May 2026.
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