Who lives in the USA

Population is concentrated on the coasts and in a band across the south. The ten most populous states — California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan — hold over half the country's people.

Growth has shifted decisively south and west over five decades. Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, Arizona, Nevada and Idaho have grown fastest; several northeastern and midwestern states have grown slowly or lost population. Cost of living, climate, and state tax policy all feature in the explanations, and the effect on congressional apportionment and the Electoral College is direct.

About 83 percent of Americans live in urban areas, but that statistic conceals how suburban the country is. The metropolitan population is dominated by suburbs rather than by dense city cores, and car dependence follows from it.

Rural America — about 14 percent of the population across roughly 97 percent of the land area — has an older age profile, declining population in many counties, and measurably worse access to health care, with hundreds of rural hospitals having closed or converted since 2010.

The total fertility rate has been below the replacement level of about 2.1 since 2007 and has continued to fall. Without immigration, the US population would be approaching decline.

About 13.6 percent of residents were born outside the country — some 46 million people, the largest immigrant population of any nation in absolute terms, and a share close to the historic peak around 1890.

The composition has shifted substantially. Mexico remains the largest single country of birth but its share has declined; India and China are the fastest-growing sources, and immigration from Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia has grown. New arrivals are also substantially more educated than in previous decades — a majority of recent immigrants hold a bachelor's degree or higher.

Legal immigration operates through family sponsorship, employment-based categories, the diversity visa lottery and humanitarian admissions, with annual numerical caps and per-country limits that produce backlogs measured in decades for some categories.

The unauthorized population is estimated at roughly 11 million, a figure that has been broadly stable for over a decade. A substantial share are long-term residents rather than recent arrivals, and many entered legally and overstayed.

The 2020 Census recorded a substantial rise in people identifying with more than one race — a change driven partly by genuine demographic shift and partly by improved question design, and the Census Bureau has been explicit that the two effects cannot be cleanly separated.

By the Census categories, roughly 58 percent identified as White alone and not Hispanic or Latino, about 19 percent as Hispanic or Latino of any race, about 12 percent as Black or African American, about 6 percent as Asian, and around 1 percent as American Indian or Alaska Native. Hispanic or Latino is an ethnicity category that cuts across racial ones, which is why the figures do not sum straightforwardly.

The under-18 population is substantially more diverse than the population as a whole, which means the composition of the country will continue to shift as older cohorts are replaced.

About 22 percent of residents speak a language other than English at home. Spanish accounts for the large majority, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic and French. Around 8 percent of the population speaks English less than 'very well', which is why federal agencies and hospitals have language access obligations.

There is no official language at federal level, though English is designated official in more than 30 states.

Religious affiliation has changed faster in the United States than almost any other social indicator. The share of adults identifying as Christian has fallen substantially over two decades, while the religiously unaffiliated have grown to roughly a quarter to a third of adults depending on the survey. The US nonetheless remains considerably more religious than most other wealthy democracies.

Household structure has shifted markedly. The share of households consisting of a married couple with children has fallen well below a third, single-person households have grown to around 29 percent, and the median age at first marriage has risen to the late twenties or early thirties.

Wealth is more unequally distributed than income, and the gap by race is large and persistent: Federal Reserve data consistently shows median White household wealth several times that of median Black and Hispanic households, driven substantially by differences in homeownership and inheritance.

Homeownership sits around 65 percent nationally but has fallen sharply among adults under 35, producing the same generational divide visible across the developed world.

Life expectancy fell notably during the pandemic and has partially recovered, but remains below the level of other wealthy countries — a gap driven by drug overdoses, firearm deaths, motor vehicle deaths and cardiovascular and metabolic disease.