Minnesota gained more people from other states in 2025, a first this decade

Minnesota gained more residents from other states than it lost to them in 2025, the first time that’s happened in seven years, new Census Bureau data shows.

But the state grew more slowly last year than it did in 2024, chiefly due to a sharp decline in international migration.

The data represents the Census Bureau’s first look at fiscal year 2025, a period that ended last June 30 and is midway through what has become the slowest decade for population growth in Minnesota history.

It shows Minnesota performing in line with multiple national population trends, including very low overall growth, less movement between states and a plunge in immigration.

Overall, Minnesota experienced a net gain of 33,000 people in 2025, a 0.6% increase to bring the total population to 5.83 million. In 2024, the state added about 44,000 people.

While overall movement between states is slowing nationally, Minnesota experienced its first gain in so-called domestic migration since 2018. The state attracted 8,300 more people from other parts of the U.S. than it lost to them.

That’s a net figure that results from the movement of around 100,000 people leaving the state and another 100,000 or so coming, a level of churn that’s been relatively consistent for many years.

“It’s great when we see one of these years that stands in contrast to the last 20 years,” State Demographer Susan Brower said in an interview. “I’m cautiously optimistic about what it means. I like to see two, three, four years before I know if we’re going back to a pattern like we saw in the 1990s.”

Brower noted there were some changes in Census Bureau methods that may account for the gain Minnesota saw in domestic migration.

The outflow pattern, along with Minnesota’s growing reliance on international immigrants to drive its growth, form two of the dominant rifts in political conversations about the development and direction of the state.

As it has since 2021, Minnesota last year relied on the arrival of international immigrants for more of its population growth than any other source.

The state attracted about 12,500 international migrants in 2025, about one-third of the 33,000 or so it did in 2024.

“We are seeing less international immigration from other data sources too,” Brower said. “And this [new data] isn’t even the full year of 2025, when we have seen much more of the kind of direct enforcement actions and policy changes that have further restricted the flow of people to the U.S. and the state.”

Over the last two months, the federal government has tried to root out undocumented immigrants from Minnesota by sending approximately 3,000 agents from the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Late last week, federal officials said those agents had arrested about 3,300 undocumented immigrants in Minnesota since Dec. 1, with about 250 of them possessing a criminal record. After agents on Saturday, Jan. 24, killed a second non-immigrant Minnesotan during the operation, senior Trump administration officials began taking steps to scale back the crackdown.

Data about undocumented immigrants in Minnesota is imprecise, with estimates ranging from about 80,000 to 130,000. The larger figure amounts to about 2.2% of the state’s population, about half the 4% estimated rate of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. population.

But as the rate of natural change, which is the number of births that exceed deaths, has declined in the state, Minnesota has relied more heavily on immigrants for population growth.

Now, that slowing trend has been exacerbated by the deaths of the oldest members of the baby boom generation.

In 2025, Minnesota experienced a gain of 12,071 people in natural change, up by about 400 people from 2024. The state demography office forecasts natural change will remain positive in Minnesota until the late 2030s, Brower said.

However, earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office forecast estimated that deaths will begin to exceed births in the country as a whole as soon as 2030. By then, it said the country would need to rely on international immigration for population growth.

Birth and death rates are easier to forecast than movement between states, Brower said.

“They are really stable inputs and so it’s easy to predict which way this is going,” she said. “It all points to the need for more people to move to this state, whether from other states or from abroad.”

Now, some reversal may be taking shape. Other states like Ohio and Michigan also saw gains in domestic migration last year. Meanwhile, states like Arizona, Florida and Texas that saw huge influxes of people during the first part of the decade had much smaller gains last year.