Category · 4 articles
Population Trends
Where Americans are moving, age structure, household composition and demographic shifts in the ACS5 era.
What you'll find here
Articles in Population Trends sit at the intersection of public data and lived experience. Every piece starts from a specific Census table, traces the number back to the household-level question that produced it, and then asks the harder question: what does this actually mean for the people, places, and markets it describes?
We avoid the two failure modes of most data writing: throwing a chart on a page and assuming it speaks for itself, or over-interpreting a single year of estimates as a trend. Where a finding warrants caveats — margin of error, geographic crosswalks, ACS1 vs ACS5 trade-offs — those caveats are in the body, not buried in a footnote.
Featured
7 min read
The Fastest-Growing U.S. States: Population Change in the ACS5 Era
Census population estimates show a clear story: the South and Mountain West gained, the Midwest and Northeast stagnated. Here's the data, and why it matters.
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6 min read
Median Age by U.S. State: The Demographic Map of America
Maine and Florida are the oldest states. Utah is by far the youngest. Median age is one of the cleanest single signals of a state's demographic future.
10 min read
The Fastest-Growing Cities in Texas (2026 Edition)
Texas added more residents than any other U.S. state in the most recent ACS5 vintage. Most of that growth is concentrated in a handful of metros — and within those metros, in a handful of suburbs. We map them.
12 min read
The 25 Fastest-Growing ZIP Codes in the United States (2026)
Based on Census ACS5 population estimates, we identify the 25 fastest-growing ZIP codes in the country — and the structural drivers (jobs, housing supply, climate) behind each one.