Fewer people are moving to Texas cities amid the country\u2019s broader immigration slowdown, but the state remains home to some of the fastest growing cities in the country, new U.S. Census Bureau data show.<\/p>\n
Celina, a city about an hour north from downtown Dallas, was the fastest growing city in the country last year, according to census data released Thursday. The city grew by 24.6%, adding more than 12,710 residents between July 2024 and July 2025.<\/p>\n
Eight of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are in Texas \u2014\u00a0primarily suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, the state\u2019s largest urban area. Meanwhile, some of the state\u2019s biggest cities like Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth are still adding tens of thousands of residents \u2014\u00a0despite a slowdown in international migration to the United States and lower birth rates.<\/p>\n
Other places in Texas are struggling, including some of its biggest cities. Out of the state\u2019s 15 largest cities, six lost residents: Dallas, El Paso, Arlington, Plano, Irving and Garland.<\/p>\n
Texas remains a high-growth state, and the economy is still growing. But the Trump administration\u2019s immigration slowdown has played a significant role in slowing that growth. As a border community, El Paso\u2019s population decline likely stems from that slowdown, said Lloyd Potter, the state demographer. International migration to El Paso County slowed significantly in 2025 as thousands of residents moved out.<\/p>\n
Other factors are weighing on the state\u2019s population growth. Fewer Texans are being born as the number of deaths is rising, Potter said. It\u2019s likely that economic uncertainty has made people less eager to move, he said. When they do, they move to places seen as more affordable and with better job opportunities than where they currently live, Potter said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTexas is still growing more than any other state,\u201d Potter said. \u201cI don\u2019t really think that we\u2019re going to all of a sudden make a turnaround and Texas is going to start losing population or [that growth] is going to slow really dramatically.\u201d<\/p>\n
Celina is among a set of Dallas\u2019 outer-ring suburbs that have boomed since the start of the decade, more than doubling their population over the past five years. Celina has almost quadrupled in size since 2020, adding more than 46,000 residents. Among U.S. cities with more than 20,000 residents, Celina ranked fourth-highest in terms of raw numerical growth.<\/p>\n
Celina Mayor Ryan Tubbs, 36, and his wife moved to Celina from Allen in 2017, seeking a quieter, family-oriented neighborhood with good schools and a slower pace, Tubbs told The Texas Tribune. Since then, it\u2019s drawn young families in search of the same thing, as well as a perception of strong public safety and proximity to major suburban job centers in Frisco and McKinney. The typical home value in Celina is north of $500,000, according to the latest Zillow data, but that\u2019s cheaper than Frisco and McKinney, Tubbs noted.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt attracts a lot of like-minded young families that want to be in new communities,\u201d Tubbs said.<\/p>\n
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Tubbs wants Celina to be more than a bedroom community, though: he said Celina aims to enter the highly competitive arms race among Dallas suburbs for major employers.<\/p>\n
Celina\u2019s not alone. Among the 15 fastest growing cities last year, six were in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs: Celina, Princeton, Melissa, Anna, Forney and Greenville.<\/p>\n
Fulshear and Hutto \u2014 about 45 minutes from downtown Houston and Austin, respectively \u2014\u00a0also were among the country\u2019s fastest growing cities.<\/p>\n
While Dallas\u2019 farflung suburbs are booming, the region\u2019s core cities aren\u2019t faring as well. Dallas remains the country\u2019s ninth largest city and the state\u2019s third largest. But the city lost more than 1,800 residents in 2025 after mostly gaining them this decade. Four other big cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth region \u2014 Irving, Garland, Carrollton and Arlington \u2014 lost more than 1,000 residents.<\/p>\n
The fast-growing suburbs tend to have relatively more affordable housing options than the core cities and greater proximity to newer schools, parks and trails and modern commercial areas, said Cullum Clark, director of the George W. Bush Institute\u2019s Economic Growth Initiative at Southern Methodist University. A perception of better public safety in the suburbs also makes them attractive, he said. Meanwhile, more established places like Dallas, Arlington, Plano and Irving aren\u2019t adding homes or redeveloping as quickly \u2014\u00a0if at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe newness is the attraction,\u201d Clark said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not all doom and gloom in the urban core. Fort Worth, which surpassed 1 million residents in 2024, became the nation\u2019s 10th largest city in 2025, surpassing Jacksonville, Fla. Cowtown also saw the greatest numeric population increase in the state \u2014 19,512. It was second overall in the nation, behind Charlotte, N.C., which added 20,731 people.<\/p>\n
San Antonio added the third-highest numerical growth in the country with 14,359 new residents.<\/p>\n
Houston and Fulshear each added about 11,000 residents while McKinney added about 8,500.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Austin passed 1 million residents \u2014\u00a0surpassing San Jose, Calif.<\/p>\n
Some 65 cities added at least 1,000 residents between 2024 and 2025, most of them in the Texas Triangle \u2014\u00a0a term used to describe the area that includes the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin regions.<\/p>\n
Disclosure: George W. Bush Institute and Southern Methodist University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune\u2019s journalism. Find a complete\u00a0list of them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fewer people are moving to Texas cities amid the country\u2019s broader immigration slowdown, but the state remains home…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":795573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5130],"tags":[7948,119722,1596,18785,79,31126,7371,13399,4345,409,9732,10548,80,7202,86525,358,7376,3187,57209,156405],"class_list":{"0":"post-795572","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-arlington","9":"tag-celina","10":"tag-dallas","11":"tag-demographics","12":"tag-economy","13":"tag-el-paso","14":"tag-fort-worth","15":"tag-garland","16":"tag-houston","17":"tag-immigration","18":"tag-irving","19":"tag-plano","20":"tag-politics","21":"tag-san-antonio","22":"tag-southern-methodist-university","23":"tag-texas","24":"tag-texas-legislature","25":"tag-tx","26":"tag-u-s-census-bureau","27":"tag-well-b-homepage"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116572379429265520","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}