Why Houston metro’s population spiked in recent years, outpacing trends in NYC, L.A. and Chicago

Americans are leaving massive metropolitan areas — places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and their surrounding suburbs — in droves, and they have been doing so for a while. But new census data tells a different story in the Houston metropolitan area, a sprawling 10-county area of more than 7.5 million people. Between July 2022 and July 2023, the Houston metro area gained nearly 140,000 people. That’s one new resident every four minutes or so, according to estimates by the Greater Houston Partnership, the city’s business association. That numerical increase was more than any other metro area in the country except for Dallas, which gained more than 150,000 people over the same period. Meanwhile, the country’s three largest metros — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — all lost people. Across the board, metro growth was clustered in the South and Southwest.

The overall population spike in the Houston metro area is clear, but what exactly is causing the growth and where it is happening is more nuanced. To understand the change, you have to look at individual changes in what demographers have identified as the three components of population change: domestic migration, which includes people moving into an area from other areas of the country; international migration, which includes people moving into an area from outside of the country; and natural change, which is the total number of births minus the total number of deaths in an area. First up, domestic migration. The Houston metro area saw nearly 40,000 people move in from other parts of the country between 2022 and 2023. What’s clear from the new census data is they’re largely not moving into Harris County or Houston. In fact, Harris County lost nearly 23,000 people to other areas of the country between 2022 and 2023: what is known as negative domestic migration. Instead, Americans from other parts of the country are largely moving into Harris County’s neighbor to the north, Montgomery County, and its neighbor to the southwest, Fort Bend County.