Mapped: The Fastest-Growing Cities and Towns in America

As people move from place to place, the populations of towns and cities also rise and fall—sometimes significantly. New York City, for example, has been the largest city in the United States since 1790. However, back then its population was a mere 33,131 people. It broke the 1 million-resident threshold less than a century later, in 1880, and its population had more than doubled by 1900. It would add a further million people every decade from the 1900s to the 1940s. According to a 2024 estimate by the Census Bureau, New York City now has nearly 8.5 million residents (down from 8.8 million in 2020).

Now, new data from the Census Bureau has uncovered the towns and cities across America that have experienced the greatest population growth not over the past few decades but over only a matter of months. Crunching the data from July 1, 2023, to July 1, 2024, the Census Bureau plotted the Top 100 biggest population changes in the United States on a map, showing the fastest-growing towns and cities as they are today.

The cities the study has highlighted are chiefly clustered in a few broad regional areas—New England and parts of the northeast, California and its surrounding states in the southwest, and Texas and Florida in the south. In between, a number of states failed to have a single town make the top 100, with Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Mississippi among the states missing out.

Looking at the data more closely, the top five biggest growers are some of America’s biggest cities, with New York coming out on top with a year-on-year population increase of just over 87,000 people. Houston came in distant second, with an increase of around 43,000 people, followed by Los Angeles with 31,000 (marking its return to the top five for the first time in almost a decade), with San Antonio in fourth (nearly 24,000), and Fort Worth not far behind in fifth (more than 23,000).

Across the country as a whole, towns and cities of all sizes recorded population increases from 2023 to 2024. Growth was smallest in places with populations below 5000, which increased by an average of 0.1 percent nationwide, compared with an average growth rate of around 1 percent everywhere else.

Some places recorded quite staggering year-on-year changes.  Incredibly, Princeton, Texas—a suburb of Dallas—saw an increase of nearly 31 percent in its population from 2023 to 2024, the biggest jump in the entire United States. (In fact, the population there has more than doubled in the 2020s alone, from 17,000 to 37,000.)

Texas actually accounts for four of the top five biggest increases in the latest data, with Fulshear coming in second with a 26.9 percent increase, followed by Celina (18.2 percent) and Anna (14.6 percent). Only Leesburg, Florida—which came in third with an increase of 18.5 percent—was located elsewhere. Coincidentally, the only two cities to cross the 1 million mark between 2023 and 2024 were Texas’s Fort Worth and Florida’s Jacksonville.

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