U.S. Center of Population Based on 2020 Census Will Show if Southwesterly Migration Continued

On Nov. 16, the U.S. Census Bureau will announce where the U.S. center of population was in 2020, a way to summarize population shifts every decade.

The colonial town of Chestertown, Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay was once a major port for the trade of tobacco and enslaved people and was the center of population in the new United States in 1790 when the first census was taken. About 3.9 million people lived in the 13 original colonies along the Atlantic coast.

“It's amazing how the population just took huge leaps, starting off with about 3 million people and then, all of a sudden, tens of millions of people. Immigration has played a huge part in that.”

— Sharon Tosi Lacey, chief historian, U.S. Census Bureau

In the 230 years since, the nation grew and expanded, and the center of the U.S. population marched steadily westward — through Ohio, Indiana, and then Illinois. In recent decades, it’s tilted to the Southwest as people moved to the Sun Belt and immigrated from the southern border.

“It's amazing how the population just took huge leaps, starting off with about 3 million people and then, all of a sudden, tens of millions of people,” said Sharon Tosi Lacey, the Census Bureau’s chief historian. “Immigration has played a huge part in that.”

This month, the U.S. Census Bureau will announce the center of population based on the 2020 Census count of everyone who lived in the United States on April 1, 2020. Since 1980, that center has been in various locations in Missouri. In 2010, the center was near Plato, a small town about 75 miles northeast of Springfield.

The center of population is the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if everyone weighed the same.

The point is officially marked with a survey monument by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the U.S. government authoritative source for precise latitude, longitude and elevation measurements.

Since 1990, the Census Bureau and NGS have placed the center of population monument in a publicly accessible location near the actual center of population.

Knowing the center of population helps geographers, demographers and others quantify how fast and in what direction Americans are moving.

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