San Jose, once the nation’s 10th largest city before falling to the 13th spot, is clawing its way up the rankings of the most populous cities in the United States.
The self-proclaimed “capital of Silicon Valley” — now creeping back toward a million residents — is officially the nation’s 12th largest city, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“It’s good to be growing again,” said Mayor Matt Mahan when he heard the news. “It just feels like there is a new energy.”
According to the new figures, as of July 1, 2024, San Jose had an estimated 997,000 residents, growing by nearly 14,000 residents from the year before. At its peak, San Jose was home to 1,032,000 residents in 2017.
In the mid 2000s, San Jose bumped Detroit from the 10th spot. For many years, San Jose remained the 10th biggest city in the country, until the coronavirus struck.
“We had some rough years during the pandemic,” Mahan said, referring to 2020 and beyond, when many remote workers fled the city for less crowded, more affordable locales.
Though it was the third most populous city in California, behind Los Angeles and San Diego, San Jose started to lose residents in 2018, and by 2022, dramatic pandemic drops pushed the city to the 12th spot.
Jacksonville, Florida, and Austin, Texas, both surpassed San Jose’s population that year.
Then 2023 data showed San Jose dropping another spot on the list, with Fort Worth, Texas, rising a spot, leaving San Jose at 13th.
Now, “this is the rebound,” Mahan said.
“We are in a horse race with Austin,” Mahan said, with a tone of satisfaction that this year’s results show San Jose ahead once again. Austin now sits in the 13th spot.
While the new census data does not include an explanation for what’s behind San Jose’s recent population surge, experts who have analyzed data from previous years and other data sources point to fluctuations in international immigration as one of the driving factors behind the population decline before and during the pandemic.
When pandemic restrictions were lifted, the return of international immigration pushed the region’s population change back into the positive. But the future for many of those immigrants in the U.S. is increasingly precarious, with the Trump administration making promises to limit foreign arrivals in many ways.
San Jose’s population first crossed over 1 million, according to census estimates, in 2013, where it remained until 2021. The city’s population was already dropping before the pandemic, partly due to immigration restrictions during Trump’s first term, so the reversal is especially notable.
Now, the city is growing again, and for the second year in a row. If the South Bay city’s population continues to increase at the same rate, it will pass a million residents for the second time by this July.
“Seeing workers and families come back to San Jose demonstrates that our focus on the basics is working, and that the Bay Area’s best days are ahead,” Mahan said.
Russell Hancock, president of the local think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley, credited at least a portion of that growth to the exploding artificial intelligence industry in the region.
But continued growth is especially precarious right now, Hancock said: “I think we are in for three rocky years.”
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Hancock sees immigration and tariffs as two issues that could impact the city’s continued growth in these next years, with the uncertainty dampening the region’s appetite for “big fateful choices,” he said, whether the tariffs are ultimately implemented or not.
According to the national data, Texas had four of the top five fastest-growing cities, including the fastest-growing city in the country; Princeton, Texas, which grew by 30% in just a year. All of the country’s fastest growing cities have populations between 25,000 and 55,000 residents, while the larger cities tend to have less dramatic year-to-year fluctuations.
“Many population growth rates reversed or saw major changes between 2023 and 2024,” said Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. “In fact, cities of all sizes, in all regions, showed faster growth and larger gains than in 2023, except for small cities in the South, whose average population growth rate remained the same,” she said.