Annual Population and Household Estimates
Announcements
Preliminary 2025 population and household estimates will be mailed to local governments for review and comment in May 2026 and finalized in July 2026.
As directed by Minnesota Statute
§473.24, community development researchers prepare annual population and household estimates for cities, townships, and counties within the Twin Cities region. These estimates:
- Inform funding decisions for state programs such as Local Government Aid, State Aid for Local Transportation, and the region's Fiscal Disparities Program.
- Provide local governments and other stakeholders with timely estimated counts of people, households, and housing units for small geographic areas.
- Allow community development researchers to highlight recent and relevant population and development trends in the Twin Cities region to policymakers.
Population and household estimates are reviewed by local governments before they are revised and certified by the Metropolitan Council. These estimates have a one-year lag; the most recent set was published in July 2025 and describe population and households in 2024.
2024 Population and household estimates
Key findings from an analysis of 2024’s population and household estimates include:
- Between 2020 and 2024, the region's population increased by 2.7%, households by 5.2%, and housing units by 6.5%.
- Recent population growth (between 2020 and 2024) is not as geographically balanced as previous decades.
- So far, the annual growth rates observed in the 2020s are considerably lower than those of previous decades.
- Housing supply is not constraining population and household growth. In fact, average annual housing production in the 2020s so far is nearly double that of the 2010s. Rather, slower growth reflects less natural growth (more deaths than births), smaller household sizes, and higher vacancy rates over this period.
RELATED VIDEO
Principal researcher Matt Schroeder presented these key findings to the Metropolitan Council on July 23, 2025 in more detail.
Watch the presentation video or view the slide deck (PDF).
Where to find annual population and households estimates
How we develop annual estimates
Our annual estimates use a housing stock-based model to estimate households and population. It is much easier to track the number of housing units—and estimate how many people live in them—than it is to account for births, deaths, and households moving into or out of small areas.
The most recent decennial census (now 2020) provides a count of all housing units by type that serves as a baseline for annual estimates throughout the decade. From here, we complete three main steps to produce annual estimates:
- We use residential building permits provided by local governments (and other secondary sources) to determine how many units to add or subtract from the 2020 baseline. These calculations create our annual Housing Stock Estimates.
- Next, we apply occupancy rates customized to each housing type to estimate the number of households.
- We use average household size customized to each housing type to estimate the number of people within households. Lastly, we add residents living in facilities that are not considered part of the housing stock (known as group quarters) to generate the total estimated population count.
Additional geographies available
We also prepare annual population and household estimates for census tracts, census block groups, Transportation Analysis Zones (TAZs), school districts, and ZIP codes in the Twin Cities region. This dataset (‘Annual Small Area Population and Household Estimates’) is available to download as an excel file or a spatial database on the Minnesota Geospatial Commons.