JACKSON, Wyo. — Headed into the 2020 Census, latest estimates show Wyoming population increased slightly for the first time after three straight years of decline.
Census figures released Monday show Wyoming’s population grew by 1,158 (0.2%) between July 2018 and July 2019 to an estimated 578,759. The numbers may not reflect an expected dip, however, that occurred later last summer when coal bankruptcies and furloughs may have sent many Wyomingites out of state looking for work.
Population estimates as of July 1, 2019 show Teton County up 8.4% since 2010 to an estimated 23,081.
Across the nation, population gain continues to slow.
“While natural increase is the biggest contributor to the U.S. population increase, it has been slowing over the last five years,” said Dr. Sandra Johnson, a demographer/statistician in the Population Division of the Census Bureau. “Natural increase, or when the number of births is greater than the number of deaths, dropped below 1 million in 2019 for the first time in decades.”
The nation’s population was 328,239,523 in 2019, growing by 0.5% between 2018 and 2019, or 1,552,022 people. Annual growth peaked at 0.73% this decade in the period between 2014 and 2015. The growth between 2018 and 2019 is a continuation of a multiyear slowdown since that period.
Forty states and the District of Columbia saw population increases between 2018 and 2019. Ten states lost population between 2018 and 2019, four of which had losses over 10,000 people. The 10 states that lost population were New York (-76,790; -0.4%), Illinois (-51,250; -0.4%), West Virginia (-12,144; -0.7%), Louisiana (-10,896; -0.2%), Connecticut (-6,233; -0.2%), Mississippi (-4,871; -0.2%), Hawaii (-4,721; -0.3%), New Jersey (-3,835; 0.0%), Alaska (-3,594; -0.5%), and Vermont (-369; -0.1%).
In Wyoming, the fertility rate was 61.0 births per 1,000 females aged 15-44 in 2018, down 4.8 percent from 64.1 in 2017, one of the worst drops in the nation. The number of births was 8,134 and the number of deaths was 4,183 in 2008 (calendar year) based on Wyoming Department of Health data, so the natural increase (birth – death) was nearly 4,000 in that year. However, ten years later, the natural increase was just below 1,500 as births decreased to 6,556 and deaths increased to 5,069 in 2018.
“The downturn of Wyoming’s energy dependent economy in 2015 and 2016 drove many residents out of the state, and the out-migration of this younger working population was also responsible for the fast decline of births,” said Dr. Wenlin Liu, Chief Economist with the Economic Analysis Division. Wyoming has one of the highest proportions of baby boomers (age 54-72 in 2018) in the U.S. Population age 65 and over in the state grew 3.9 percent between 2017 and 2018, higher than the U.S. rate of 3.1 percent.
“Both the number and the proportion of old residents will continued to grow fast in the coming decades as more boomers age into 65 years old, and so will the number of deaths,” Liu added. “Consequently, policy makers in many states must place increased attention on caring for a larger and more dependent aging population, and dealing with the realities of a slow-growing labor force.”
Meanwhile, every state will have to rely heavily on domestic in-migration and international immigrants in order to fuel population growth or even to avoid decline.
