South Carolina came out as the fastest-growing state in the country, even as Democrat-led cities on both coasts continue hemorrhaging residents at striking rates.
Between July 2024 and July 2025, 66,622 more Americans relocated to South Carolina than left it, driving a 1.5% population increase that outpaced every other state, , Fox News reported.
Federal data reinforces the scale of the shift. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that national population growth slowed to just 0.5% during the same window, the weakest annual increase since the pandemic era. Five states actually shrank: California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont and West Virginia. Idaho and North Carolina trailed South Carolina at 1.4% and 1.3% growth, respectively. (RELATED: Mayor Mamdani Says Exodus From New York Is Just Your Imagination)
New York City lost 114,000 more residents to other parts of the country than it gained last year, according to a Citizens Budget Commission study cited by Fox News. International arrivals to the city collapsed by 70% over the same period, erasing the demographic cushion that long masked domestic departures.
Los Angeles County took the heaviest numeric hit of any county in the nation, shedding 53,421 residents between mid-2024 and mid-2025, according to Census Bureau. The county’s population has dropped from roughly 10 million in 2020 to 9.7 million today. San Francisco, despite an artificial intelligence hiring surge, still sits below its pre-pandemic population, Fox News reported.
Even Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has acknowledged the bleeding. She publicly urged wealthy residents to come back in March, warning that the loss of tax revenue threatens the state’s social safety net.
Dem Governor Begs Rich People Who Fled New York For Florida To Return And Foot Bill For ‘Generous Social Programs’: ‘Support the generous social programs that we want to have’ https://t.co/HYnPtRf9FV
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 19, 2026
“Wall Street businesses looking at Texas” was a primary concern, Hochul told Fox News, conceding that New York is “in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden.”
Tax data points to where those residents are headed. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation found in an April 7, 2026, study that Texas now adds a new taxpayer every four minutes and 40 seconds, surpassing Florida in 2022. Florida still leads the country in income migration, pulling in roughly $36.1 billion in net annual income, according to the Florida Chamber of Commerce.
The fastest-growing counties in America now sit clustered across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, the Census Bureau confirmed.