Utah has long been considered one of the fastest-growing states in the country, but that growth is showing its first signs of slowing.
Utah’s population grew by 1.5% in 2024 to 3,506,838 people. That’s down slightly from 1.6% in 2023, according to the newest batch of population estimates by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
In layman’s terms, the recent growth accounts for an increase of 50,392 people, or “about the size of Murray City,” said Director Natalie Gochnour. The institute’s numbers do not account for seasonal residents or an influx in population due to tourism.
Utah County had the most growth with 21,853 new residents, which accounted for 43.4% of the state’s total growth last year. Salt Lake County had the second-highest, with 12,113 people, followed by Washington County with 5,858 new residents.
Tooele County experienced the highest percentage increase of any larger county, growing by 3.1% or 2,448 people. Only Piute saw a higher growth rate at 5.3%, but that equates to just an increase of 84 people in that rural county.
According to the data, after a high of 1.96% in 2017, Utah’s overall population growth rate hovered around the 1.7% mark before dipping in 2023 and 2024.
“We're really moving into the middle of the decade now, and we're starting to see some slowing population growth,” said institute demographer Emily Harris. “We're also seeing a lot of our indicator data starting to stabilize.”
One of the biggest metrics that has stabilized, she said, is Utah’s natural increase rate, or the number of births minus the number of deaths. While the state’s birth rate has been declining for the past decade, the natural increase rate has begun to stabilize after a spike in deaths during the pandemic.
Harris said it is unclear if this is a new trend or just a blip in the data.
“We do know people are waiting longer to have their first kid, and we know that there are a lot of millennials that are in kind of their early and mid-30s, and that could potentially keep the fertility rate from declining more as we kind of have a backlog of births that haven't occurred but might start to occur. We just don't really necessarily know that yet.”
New state fertility data is expected to be released in March.
Utah’s net in-migration has been the largest driver of growth in recent years and accounted for 52% of the state’s total growth in 2024, which is down compared to past years. Although that number is down, Harris said net migration is “much more volatile” than looking at other metrics like births and deaths.
“Net migration is heavily tied to Utah's economic cycles and oftentimes broader U.S. trends,” she said. “Since 2015, net migration has been relatively high and it peaked right in 2021 and 2022 during all of COVID and it's been slowly dropping ever since then.”
The data was gathered between July 1, 2023, and July 1, 2024, and factors in data from the Census Bureau, the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, as well as building permits, public school enrollment numbers and tax information. Any changes between the summer of 2024 and now are not reflected in the report.
Eight counties — Summit, Daggett, Uinta, Carbon, Emery, Sevier, Garfield and Kane — saw population decreases. Some of that can be explained by more deaths than births, but out-migration also plays a factor.
While they can’t pinpoint where people who leave a specific county go, Harris said what they do know is the “likelihood that they're moving somewhere to another county within the state is higher than leaving the state.”
Several factors account for the slowdown in net migration and people leaving certain counties for opportunities elsewhere. Gochnour said larger economic factors are likely at play. Especially the state’s burdensome housing affordability struggles.
“We have an expensive housing market and that's a factor in both people moving here and people staying here when they have alternatives,” she said. “There's just incredible uncertainty in the economy right now, and when you're uncertain, you don't invest or you don't hire.”
