California’s population increased by 108,000 people last year, growing for the second year in a row, according to new estimates released by the California Department of Finance. This new data solidifies what last year’s data showed for the first time: The much-discussed exodus has ended, after three years of population losses during early coronavirus pandemic disruptions and California’s stricter-than-average lockdown rules.
California’s population was estimated to be 39,529,101 on January 1, 2025, an increase of 0.28% from the year before. The population total is just 10,000 people short of the state’s peak population of 39,538,223 as of the 2020 Census counts on April 1, 2020.
In 2020, the state’s population dropped by 166,000 residents, and another 190,000 in 2021, leaving just 39.18 million estimated residents in the Golden State on Jan. 1 2022. In 2022, the recovery started, with the state growing by an estimated 49,000 residents, then growing by 192,000 the next year.
While the state’s growth has brought the population back to pre-pandemic levels, the annual increase is still short of the average increase of 287,000 residents a year between 2011 and 2016.
The state demographers use the U.S. Census Bureau decennial counts, and then base their estimates on state-specific death, birth and immigration data. Some California experts prefer the Department of Finance data over the U.S. Census Bureau’s population estimates because the Census uses the same formula for all states, while California’s demographers can make more California-specific estimates.
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The report from the finance department also reflects “an upward revision of California’s 2023 population to a growth rate of 0.49 percent, up from its previously estimated 0.2-percent growth rate,” meaning the state was growing faster in 2023 than last year’s estimates showed.
The state’s demographers attribute the second consecutive year of growth to a variety of factors, including an increase in natural growth, with about 115,000 more births than deaths in 2024, and new data sources that “better estimate California’s share of recent increases in legal immigration” for 2021 through 2024, leading to an additional 277,000 more immigrants in those years than last year’s estimates showed.
For a short period during the chaos of the early pandemic, the state’s estimates started to diverge from the national estimates for California’s population, but that gap has shrunk as the two sources have largely re-aligned.
Census population estimates are calculated for July 1 of each year, whereas the state’s estimates are for Jan. 1 of each year.
