Vermont population growth flattens

BY ERIN PETENKO VTDigger

Vermont’s population grew by less than 0.02 percent from 2021 to 2022, according to new population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The low population growth — a change of fewer than 100 people out of more than 640,000 residents — mirrors data from 2010 to 2019, when experts and policymakers raised alarms about the state’s aging population, waning birth rate and net loss from people moving out of the state.

But from 2020 to 2021, that trend completely flipped, with a reported 4,800 net gain from Covid-19 pandemic migrants, according to the census. Home sales to out-of-state buyers surged, and ski towns gained more people than the census ex- pected based on pre-pandemic trends.

Now, it appears that Vermont’s population growth in the second year of the pandemic came closer to its pre-pandemic average than to that brief surge. The state gained a reported 2,000 people from domestic and international migration, but that increase was almost completely counterbalanced by deaths and a low birth rate, according to census data.

Michael Moser, head of the Vermont State Data Center at the University of Vermont, cautioned that the data may be skewed by unique challenges in the 2020 census that could resonate down census datasets for years to come.

“We have to keep in mind that there are very many confounding factors,” he said.

Among those factors are the first all-digital census, temporary shifts in people’s residency in the early days of the pandemic and new rules to protect privacy by obscuring certain datasets. The 2020 census counted almost 20,000 more residents than the 2019 population estimates — but it’s hard to say what may be true growth and what is a remnant of data issues.

“The Census Bureau is trying to claw back closer to reality, but they can’t go back in time. They can only go forward,” Moser said.

But there are other signs that waning migration is more than just a blip in the data. For one thing, it’s reflected in national trends. Rural states gained thousands of new residents in the early days of the pandemic, then reported far less migration in the second year, the Census Bureau reported.

Home sales to out-of-state residents also fell in the second year of the pandemic, according to data from the Vermont Department of Taxes. About 4,000 home sales reported out-of-state buyers in 2022, compared with about 5,200 in 2021.

Kevin Chu, executive director of the Vermont Futures Project think tank, said via email that telework was part of the reason for the early pandemic’s population boom, along with a variety of reasons see POPULATION page 20

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