For Second Straight Year, California Sees a Population Decline (Published 2022) (2024)

LOS ANGELES — Deaths from Covid. Aging baby boomers. Fewer children. Restrictions on immigration.

These factors, not to mention the soaring cost of living, are forcing California — long associated in the public imagination as a destination and place of growth — to confront the fact that it is a shrinking state.

For the second time in two years, the California Department of Finance has reported a drop in the state’s population.

California lost 117,552 residents last year, driven largely by the Covid death toll and a sharp drop in foreign immigration. This followed a slightly bigger decline in 2020, when the state lost 182,083 residents — the first time in more than a century that California got smaller.

Officials recorded about 275,000 people leaving California last year, up from about 180,000 in the years before the pandemic. That decline is typically offset by the arrival of immigrants from abroad, but last year that figure plummeted. Before the pandemic, the average annual influx of immigrants was 140,000 people; last year the figure dropped to 43,300.

The rise in migration out of California, which remains the country’s most populous state with more than 39 million residents, is partly explained by the easing of pandemic restrictions.

“Early on in the pandemic, nobody was going anywhere,” H.D. Palmer, a Finance Department spokesman, said, adding, “As you started coming out of Covid, those people who might have otherwise been inclined to move on did so.”