Miami-Dade takes population hit in Census, immigration actions cited

Written by Miami Today on April 1, 2026

Miami-Dade’s resident growth has hit a wall, as population dropped by 10,115 from July 2024 to July 2025 to 2,802,029 people, census figures released last week show.

Miami-Dade, still the nation’s seventh most populous county, showed the third largest drop in the nation over a 12-month period when total U.S. population rose 0.5% and counties with more than 1 million residents averaged gains of 0.3%.

The U.S. Census Bureau attributed the losses in large metro areas that attract new residents from outside U.S. borders to a successful federal effort to choke off immigration from abroad.

“The nation’s largest counties … are often international migration hubs, gaining large numbers of international migrants and losing people that move to other parts of the country via domestic migration,” said George M. Hayward, a census bureau demographer. “With fewer gains from international migration, these types of counties saw their population growth diminish or even turn into a loss.”

International growth had been Miami-Dade’s energizer – from April 2020 to July 2023, the county had a net population gain of 107,785 in moves between the county and places abroad.

That gain had masked the net outflow of 134,382 more people leaving Miami for the rest of the nation than came in from the U.S. Even with 12,406-person gain of births over deaths in the 2020-2023 period, total population declined.

Miami-Dade’s decline in population from 2024 to 2025 was exceeded in Los Angeles County with a 53,9343-person loss and Pinellas County on Florida’s West Coast, which lost 11,834 people. Of the ten counties that grew most in the period, five are in Texas.

The latest figures place Ocala, FL, at the top of the list for percentage growth among smaller metro areas with 20,000 or more residents in the period. The region’s 3.4% growth – from 427,995 residents to 442,660 – was ahead of Myrtle Beach, SC, at 3.2% growth and Spartanburg, SC, at 2.8%.