South Carolina Named 6th-Fastest-Growing State

South Carolina Named Sixth-Fastest-Growing State in the Nation

The influx of residents moving from other parts of the country to South Carolina made it the sixth-fastestgrowing state in the U.S. this year.

The Palmetto State gained just 1,600 more people from 2018 to 2019 than it did the year before, but its percent increase ranked several spots higher as other states saw their population growth slow.

South Carolina is now home to about 5.15 million people after adding 64,558 new residents from July 2018 to July 2019, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau last month.

The state saw the same percent increase, about 1.3 percent, last year and was ranked ninth for percentage growth.

Idaho, which ranked second behind Nevada last year, had the fastest growth by percentage in 2019 at 2.1 percent. Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Texas all made the top five by percent growth.

Three states that had outpaced South Carolina’s growth in 2018 — Colorado, Florida and Washington state — saw their growth rates drop this year, bumping South Carolina higher up on the list.

Slowing birth rates have continued to dampen population growth nationwide.

The natural increase in the U.S. — the number of deaths subtracted from the number of births — was below 1 million in 2019. It hasn’t been that low in decades, Sandra Johnson, a demographer and statistician in the Population Division of the Census Bureau, said in a release Monday.

There also were fewer births in 2019 than in 2018 in 42 states, including South Carolina.

“While natural increase is the biggest contributor to the U.S. population increase, it has been slowing over the last five years,” Johnson said.

Four states and Puerto Rico had negative birth rates, compared with just two states and Puerto Rico last year.

Maine, West Virginia, Vermont and New Hampshire all had more deaths than births recorded for 2019. The net gain from people moving from other countries to the U.S. is also dipping. About 595,000 more people moved into the country than out of it from 2018 to 2019, the lowest level this decade.

With births and international in-migration on the decline, population changes across the U.S. have largely been the result of people shuffling from state to state, leaving some areas with dwindling populations and others, like South Carolina, with a steady stream of new residents.

Moves between states fueled much of the population growth in the South, which outpaced other regions for both percentage and numeric growth in 2019.

In the Northeast, where people are leaving states such as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts at faster rates than others are moving in, the region’s population decreased for the first time in a decade.

Ten states saw their population shrink from 2018 to 2019, including four where the figure dropped by 10,000 people or more.

Meanwhile, the Palmetto State gained tens of thousands of people from out-of-state moves.

The vast majority — about 82 percent — of the 64,500 people who were added to South Carolina’s ranks of residents moved from other parts of the United States.

The natural increase in South Carolina was minimal since there were just about 5,600 more births than deaths for the year.

That’s “consistent with the trends” the Census Bureau has seen from other states that ranked highly this year for population growth, Johnson told The Post and Courier.

Domestic migration was the largest component of population change from 2018 to 2019 for all of the top 10 states by numeric growth except for Texas, Johnson noted. It was also the largest component of growth for the top 10 states by percentage growth, with Texas and Utah as the exceptions.

Reprinted from the Post and Courier