Detroit’s population grew by about 5,000 people in 2025, the third year of growth in a row for a city that had previously lost residents for nearly seven decades.
The continued increase in residents in Michigan’s largest city came as population growth occurred among other major cities and outlying townships in the state’s second and third most populous counties, according to newly released estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau data.
Detroit was home to an estimated 649,095 people last year, a 0.8% hike from the 644,035 residents in 2024 and 1.7% more than its population in 2020, according to the Census Bureau data released Thursday. It remained the 27th largest city in the U.S. by population.
“Three years of consecutive population growth show very clearly that Detroit is a place more people want to live and that its best days are ahead of it,” Mayor Mary Sheffield said in a statement to The Detroit News.
Sheffield said she was focused on “continuing our population growth by building more housing, including 1,000 new single-family homes over the next four years, and by being a city that supports the needs of existing residents and new Detroiters alike.”
Most of the population growth statewide was concentrated in major cities, such as Detroit and Grand Rapids, or the outlying townships in Oakland and Macomb counties, according to Kurt Metzger, director emeritus of Data Driven Detroit.
The data indicated “a younger educated population looking for either university towns or certainly the larger cities like Detroit and Grand Rapids,” Metzger said, while families moved to the northern suburbs of Detroit for lower taxes and more spacious lots. Grand Rapids had more than 201,000 residents.
Data released in March showed that the populations of Oakland County and Macomb County grew from 2020 to 2025, while Wayne County lost more than 20,000 residents. The fastest-growing county in the state was in west Michigan’s Kent County, which gained more than 16,700 residents during that five-year period.
Nationwide, the largest cities experienced the sharpest population declines from 2024 to 2025, while smaller cities in the same metropolitan area experienced more growth, according to the Census Bureau.
“Big-city growth slowed significantly between 2024 and 2025, with some major hubs even seeing small declines,” said Matt Erickson, a Census Bureau statistician. In a press release, Erickson said “… midsized cities found a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where domestic and international migration, paired with new housing, helped prevent the sluggish growth seen in small towns and larger metropolitan centers.”
Former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan had criticized the Census Bureau’s methodology until estimates started showing population gains, claiming that the bureau undercounted Detroit’s population in 2020.
Detroit grows again, most Wayne communities shrink
Detroit gained more residents than any other city in Michigan from 2024 to 2025, continuing a stretch of population growth that many in the city have celebrated.
Prior to 2023, Detroit’s population had declined every year since 1957, a 65-year period during which Detroit began as the nation’s fifth-largest city and ended outside the top 25.
Detroit’s inner-ring suburbs experienced the opposite trend: The cities of Dearborn, Westland, Dearborn Heights and Taylor in Wayne County each lost at least 3% of their population from 2020 to 2025. The only other Wayne County communities to gain population from 2020 to 2025 were Canton Township and Sumpter Township in the western part of the county.
“If nothing else, it just points out the importance of Detroit to the state,” Metzger said.
“It’s so important that we have the strong central cities … because that’s what’s going to drive growth in Michigan,” he added.
Dearborn experienced the largest decline, losing almost 4,000 people, or 3.6% of its population, in the five-year period of 2020-25. The city had 105,611 residents in 2025, down from 109,557 in 2020.
It reversed a period of significant growth over the previous decade. From 2010 to 2020, Dearborn had grown by more than 10,000 residents and was the seventh-largest city in Michigan.
Metzger called the 2025 population figures for Dearborn and nearby communities “depressing,” but said the methodology used by the Census Bureau might create inaccurate estimates.
Since Wayne County’s population declined overall while Detroit’s population grew, the balance of population loss was placed on the inner-ring suburbs.
“Because Wayne County’s population had gone down, in order to give Detroit its due and its population growth, they had to take away population from everybody else,” Metzger said.
In at least two Wayne County cities, though, River Rouge and Highland Park, Metzger said the trend of declining population is likely to continue. River Rouge declined 5.1% to 6,812 residents over the past five years, while Highland Park fell 7.8% to 8,248 during the same period.
River Rouge and Highland Park, the former home of the Chrysler Corp. headquarters, have experienced “just tremendous abandonment, high poverty rates, high (housing) vacancy.”
In October 2023, the administration of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer brokered a deal to end litigation over roughly $55 million in disputed water bills that Highland Park owed to the Great Lakes Water Authority. Suburban communities in Wayne and Macomb counties had rebelled over getting their water and sewer rates hiked to make up for Highland Park’s debt.
The state deal included $70 million for upgrading Highland Park’s outdated water infrastructure, which was notorious for huge leaks.
Townships quickly gain residents
Townships in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties added a combined 20,000 residents since 2020, while all other places combined to lose more than 18,000 people.
This is reflected in detached single-family home permits, where Macomb Township in Macomb County was first in the southeast Michigan region in 2024 with 317 units, followed by Oakland County’s Lyon Township at 197 homes authorized and Oakland County’s Milford Township at 177, according to the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments.
“It’s this whole idea of people feel they can get more for the money in these townships,” Metzger said. “Obviously, the townships have lower taxes.”
In Wayne County, two townships bucked the trend of population decline along with Detroit: Canton, which gained about 1,000 residents from 2020 to 2025, and Sumpter, which added more than 1,600 people.
Canton has been exploding for decades and reached nearly an estimated 100,000 residents, or 99,714, up 0.9% from 98,804 in 2020.
The township’s advantage lies in its strong public services, low taxes and diverse housing stock, said Township Supervisor Anne Marie Graham-Hudak.
“We have everything from mobile homes through multimillion-dollar homes,” Graham-Hudak said. “It’s a community for people from all walks of life.”
Many people have recently moved to Canton from inner-ring suburbs like Dearborn, she said, while existing residents tend to stay for many years.
“I think it’s the charm. I grew up in Ferndale, and when I came to Canton, I didn’t think I’d be living here long. I’ve been here 30 years,” Graham-Hudak said. “It’s like a big community with a small community feel.”
In Sumpter, the township’s population surged 16.8% to 11,384 residents from 9,747 in 2020 because more people moved into its mobile home parks, said Township Manager Ken Marten.
Marten told The News the sudden increase has strained local resources, because calls for fire and police services have increased, while property taxes on mobile homes don’t produce much revenue.
“I’m not disparaging folks who live in the mobile home parks, but it does create a challenge,” Marten said.
bwarren@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Detroit’s population grows for third straight year as these suburbs drop
Reporting by Ben Warren, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
