Philly’s population increased last year, but post-pandemic growth slowed

Philadelphia’s population appears to still be rebounding — but at a slowing rate — from significant losses during the pandemic years, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

For the second year in a row, the bureau noted an increase in the city’s population, which stood at 1,574,281 residents. Though the latest estimated gain — 1,546 new residents between July 2024 and July 2025 — was much more modest than the prior year’s estimated gain of 6,913 residents.

Even with the gains of the past two years, Philadelphia still has a ways to go to reclaim the 1.6 million-person population it boasted in July 2020.

Though the increase may be small, the trend is promising, said Gregory Diebold, a planning data specialist with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

“Philadelphia provides a cost of living, amenities, and a stable, diverse economy that is attractive,” Diebold said. “The data seems to be pointing to those all being positive factors and potential reasons why we are faring well and this trend is continuing past last year.”

Philadelphia’s slow growth wasn’t unusual.

Growth slowed in a majority of the nation’s 3,143 counties, the bureau said.

Of the 387 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas reviewed by the bureau, 310 saw a slower rate of population growth between 2024 and 2025 than the prior year.

On a national level, the bureau attributed much of this change to a smaller number of people immigrating to the United States.

The city’s marginal population bump was partly due to 7,216 people coming from elsewhere in the world to live in Philadelphia between July 2024 and July 2025. That’s a significantly smaller number of immigrants moving to the city than in recent years.

Though this aligns with the nationwide trends, cities like Philadelphia often depend on immigrant labor to replace the residents who are aging out of the workforce, Diebold said.

During his 2024 run for office, President Donald Trump emphasized a desire to restrict immigration and bolster deportation rates. Both became major focuses of his agenda throughout the start of his second term. The newly released data covers Trump’s first six months in office, offering an early look at how his immigration policy may be starting to affect the nation’s population.

“Of course there’s a new administration. There are policy changes,” Diebold said. “It’s not [necessarily] the case that that will continue in future years in terms of international migration.”

However, if international migration does continue to slow, that could spell major trouble for the city’s workforce.

Philadelphia has about 158,000 foreign-born workers, which is about one in every five working residents, according to a March 10 report from the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia. These residents often occupy service and logistics roles that overlap with gig work, the report said.

That means a smaller trickle of foreign-born residents moving to Philly could lead to higher gig service prices, longer delivery wait times, and reduced rideshare availability due to staffing gaps, according to the report.

Though the city gained fewer immigrant residents between 2024 and 2025, it also lost fewer residents to other cities than in years past.

Between 2024 and 2025, Philadelphia lost an estimated 9,726 residents to elsewhere in the country. That’s a significantly smaller figure than the prior year’s 14,945, or the 29,087 people Philadelphia lost to other parts of the country the year before that.

It’s hard to say what could be contributing to more people staying, said Katie Martin, who leads research at Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative.

“I haven’t seen that before in previous years of population data,” Martin said. “That is a new trend that I wasn’t expecting.”

One possibility, Martin said, is that the city’s high unemployment rate — a monthly average of about 5.1% in 2025, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data — is preventing people from being able to move.

“When you see a slowing economy, you will also see less migration overall happening,” Martin said.

Generally, people leaving the city is a bad sign for its future, she said, so maintaining residents is important. But that decline in people moving out may also indicate residents are stagnant in their lives and professional and personal development.

“You don’t want people who are born here leaving these areas,” Martin said. “But it also shows jobs access. It shows people moving to school. It shows a lot of people are pursuing opportunity when they move.”

Montgomery and Chester Counties picked up about 2,500 and 2,600 residents, respectively. Meanwhile, Bucks lost around 600 people, and Delaware lost around 500.

In the grand scheme of those counties’ populations, those changes are relatively minor.

For Montgomery County, this meant a 0.3% population increase and, in Chester County, a 0.5% increase.

Bucks and Delaware both lost around 0.1% of their population, according to the estimates.

Diebold said he suspected growth in Montgomery and Chester could relate to those counties having more available land and more new housing units, while Bucks and Delaware haven’t built up as rapidly.

The New Jersey counties saw more significant growth across the board in 2025, continuing a trend of recent increases there. That may be because they have smaller populations, so any growth looks more pronounced in data, Diebold said.

Burlington County grew the most with 3,917 new residents, a 0.8% population increase.

Camden County added 2,204 residents, growing 0.4%, and Gloucester‘s population grew by 1,375 people, also an increase of 0.4%.

Both Diebold and Martin cautioned reading too much into any of these figures, as the data only covers one year and is often revised by the bureau the following year. For example, the bureau reported Philadelphia’s population growth in 2024 as about 10,500 residents, and revised that figure down to about 7,000 in this data set.

“It will be interesting to see how this trend continues,” Diebold said.