More Than 141,000 People Moved Out Of Illinois In 2022: Census Bureau

CHICAGO — Illinois was one of only three states to experience a six-digit decline in its population over the past year, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released Thursday.

The Land of Lincoln lost 104,437 residents from July 2021 to July 2022, according to the bureau. Only New York lost a greater share of its population.

The population decline has been driven by domestic outmigration — people moving to other states.

Since April 2020, the number of births in Illinois exceeded deaths by more than 6,000 people and about 43,500 immigrants arrived from other countries.

But during that same period, more than 282,000 residents — about 2 percent of the population — moved out-of-state.

An earlier Census Bureau estimate of domestic outmigration from Illinois suggested nearly 866,000 people moved away between 2010 and 2019.

All of Illinois' neighboring states added people during the year ending in July 2022, according to the census, which use current data about births, deaths and migration to estimate population changes since the most recent decennial census.

The South was the nation's fastest-growing part of the country, with the region adding 1.37 million people.

“There was a sizeable uptick in population growth last year compared to the prior year’s historically low increase,” said Kristie Wilder, a Census Bureau demographer, said in a release announcing the estimates. “A rebound in net international migration, coupled with the largest year-over-year increase in total births since 2007, is behind this increase.”

Florida had the largest relative change in population, growing by 1.9 percent and adding nearly 417,000 people.

“While Florida has often been among the largest-gaining states,” Wilder said. “this was the first time since 1957 that Florida has been the state with the largest percent increase in population.”

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Next to the Sunshine State, the biggest relative gains in populations over the past year have come in Idaho (1.8 percent), South Carolina (1.7 percent) and Texas (1.6 percent).

Other than Illinois, the biggest declines in absolute population came in New York (-180,341), California (-1113,649), Pennsylvania (-40,051), Louisiana (-36,857) and Oregon (-16,164), according to the population estimates released Thursday.

In May, the Census Bureau announced its estimates of undercount and overcount rates as part of its post-enumeration survey, which found Illinois, along with a handful of southern states, had been undercounted in the 2020 Census.

The bureau estimated with a 90 percent confidence interval that the state's population had been undercounted by somewhere between 3.43 and 0.51 percent when it was found to have lost 18,000 residents between 2010 and 2020.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker celebrated the news at the time, characterizing Illinois as "a state on the rise."