After first population drop in decades, King County rebounded in 2022 (2024)

King County in 2021 experienced its first population decline in nearly 50 years. It wasn’t a huge number — a drop of roughly 20,000 residents — but after years of tremendous growth, it was something of a shock.

When that data was released, I wrote that the million-dollar question was whether the decline was a pandemic-era blip or the start of a trend.

Now we have our answer.

New population data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows King County bounced back. From July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022, the county’s population grew by nearly 14,000. That doesn’t offset all the population loss from the year before, but it does show that we’re growing again.

Last year’s increase represents a 0.6% growth rate and brings the county’s total population to around 2,267,000. Granted, that’s a modest rate compared with the boom years of the 2010s, when King was among the fastest-growing big counties in the nation.

There are two ways population can grow: migration (domestic and international) and “natural increase,” which is births minus deaths.

The pandemic, of course, greatly curtailed the movement of people between countries, which had a dramatic effect on international immigration. This hit King County particularly hard because international migration had been the primary driver of growth in the previous decade.

In 2021, King County grew by an anemic 9,000 through international migration. Last year, that number surged to 23,000, making international migration the primary driver of growth in 2022 by a wide margin.

But even as international migration soared, we continued to lose residents to other U.S. counties. In 2022, King had a net decline of 16,000 people through domestic migration — in other words, the number who moved away to other U.S. counties exceeded the number who moved here by 16,000. That sounds pretty bad until you consider that in 2021, King lost nearly 38,000 through domestic migration.

So between the 23,000-person gain from international migration and the 16,000-person loss from domestic migration in 2022, King County had a net gain of around 7,000 residents just from migration.

The county also grew by nearly 8,000 through natural increase — there were around 24,000 births and 16,000 deaths in 2022. These numbers aren’t very different from what we saw in 2021.

Total population change also includes a residual, which represents the change in population that cannot be attributed to any specific demographic component — King County had a residual loss of 1,500 in 2022.

Last year, most of the 25 largest U.S. counties saw population increases, or at least slower population declines than they had in 2021. The most impressive turnaround was in New York County (Manhattan), which grew by more than 17,000 people last year after having lost nearly 100,000 in 2021.

The fastest-growing big counties were all in the Sunbelt. Bexar County, Texas, where San Antonio is located, ranked No. 1 among the 25 largest counties, with a growth rate of 1.4%. Maricopa County, Ariz., which includes Phoenix, and Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, were second and third, in that order. Maricopa’s numeric gain was the greatest, an increase of around 57,000 residents.

Other big counties continued to slide. Queens County, N.Y., experienced a population decline of 2.2%, a loss of about 50,000 residents. The largest numeric decline was in Los Angeles County, which lost around 91,000 residents.

Statewide, Washington grew by about 45,000 in 2022 to hit a total population of nearly 7.8 million. The growth rate last year was 0.6%, significantly higher than the 0.2% growth in 2021.

Snohomish County grew by 0.5% and Pierce County’s population was unchanged from 2021.

Only three counties lost population: Walla Walla, Clallam and Island.

Special mention must be given to Whitman County, home to Washington State University. In 2021, Whitman saw its population drop by 9.6% as college students were absent because of the pandemic. But in 2022, the students came back, and the county’s population grew by just over 10% — the fastest growth rate of any U.S. county above 20,000 in population.