How this dataset is built.

01What this dataset is

A normalized, source-traceable, annually updated register of U.S. cities with current population, annual history, growth, density, land area, and centroid coordinates. Every field traces back to a specific raw Census file recorded with its sha256 in our build manifest.

The audience is someone who will scrutinize the numbers — a journalist, urban planner, real-estate analyst, researcher, or data-curious resident. The dataset is built to be defensible at that level. It is not a casual list-content product.

• Current population (Vintage V2024, July 1, 2024 reference date).
• Annual estimate history: 2010–2019 from V2019 and 2020–2024 from V2024.
• Within-vintage growth fields (absolute and percent) — never crossing the seam.
• National and state population, growth, and density rank.
• Land area, water area, density, and centroid (lat, lon).
• Stable Census geoid and a stable URL slug.
• Per-row provenance flags pointing back to the source file each value came from.

02How Census produces these numbers

Census does not count residents annually. The annual numbers are estimates built from the most recent decennial census plus year-by-year changes:

1. County estimates first. A cohort-component method on births, deaths, and domestic + international migration updates each county's population annually since the 2020 census.
2. Subcounty distribution. For each place or MCD, Census estimates housing units, multiplies by a household-population-per-housing-unit ratio derived from the 2020 census, and produces an “uncontrolled” household-population estimate.
3. Controlled to county totals. A rake factor rescales subcounty household-population estimates so they sum exactly to the published county household-population total. Subcounty estimates are not independent of county estimates.
4. Group quarters added separately. Population in correctional, juvenile, nursing, college, military, and other institutional facilities is estimated separately from a Group Quarters Report and added back. A college town's apparent year-to-year change can be driven entirely by reported dorm occupancy.
5. Final rounding uses a “greatest mantissa” method so rounded subcounty values still sum to the controlled county total.

03What counts as a “city”

The Population Estimates Program (PEP) only produces annual subcounty estimates for “areas of general-purpose government.” That means incorporated places (cities, towns, villages, boroughs, municipalities) plus minor civil divisions in 20 strong-MCD states. PEP does not publish annual estimates for Census-Designated Places (CDPs).

The V1 cities table includes 19,479 records:

What V1 explicitly does not include

• Minor civil divisions (SUMLEV=061). A real coverage gap. Edison Township NJ (~107k), Hempstead town NY (~800k), Brookhaven town NY (~487k), Cherry Hill NJ, and many other major Northeast population centers are missing. Tracked as the highest-priority V2 expansion.
• CDPs other than Urban Honolulu. PEP doesn't estimate them annually. For unincorporated communities like Silver Spring MD, Arlington VA, and East Los Angeles CA, use the decennial census or ACS directly.
• Place-portions and county-balance partition records (SUMLEV=071, 157, 172). These overlap with the place records — including them would double-count.
• U.S. territories. Puerto Rico, USVI, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands are published in separate releases and are not in V1. The 51 jurisdictions covered are 50 states + DC.

04Consolidated cities & special cases

Eight cities have consolidated their government with their county or surrounding territory. Census represents them at SUMLEV=170 (the legally meaningful unit) plus a SUMLEV=162 “balance” record. We use the SUMLEV=170 population and borrow the SUMLEV=162 balance's gazetteer geometry, since the gazetteer doesn't publish a separate row for the consolidated entity. This slightly understates land area — and overstates density — for these eight cities by the area of separately-incorporated enclaves.

• Milford CT · Athens-Clarke County GA · Augusta-Richmond County GA · Indianapolis IN · Greeley County KS · Louisville/Jefferson County KY · Butte-Silver Bow MT · Nashville-Davidson TN.

Three additional legal-status edge cases must be included explicitly:

Urban Honolulu CDP, HI

Pop 344,967. Honolulu has no separate municipal government from Honolulu County (consolidated since 1907); Census represents the city as a CDP. A strict “active legal city” rule would remove the largest city in Hawaii. Included with place_type='cdp_in_estimates'.

Washington city, DC

Pop 702,250. DC has no separate city government from the federal district itself; the place record is “nonfunctioning” because the government function is at the state-equivalent level. Included.

Houma city, LA & Tribune city, KS

Census places that no longer have an active independent municipal government but still report population. Included for completeness.

05Geographic enrichment

SUB-EST does not contain land area or coordinates. Land area, water area, and centroids come from the 2025 Census Gazetteer (cutoff January 1, 2025). Density is computed as pop_2024 / land_area_sqmi, NULL when land_area_sqmi is 0 or missing.

The join key is built from the SUB-EST STATE + PLACE (or CONCIT for SUMLEV=170) zero-padded into a 7-character GEOID. 19,476 of the 19,479 total cities match the 2025 Gazetteer cleanly. The 3 unmatched are most likely places annexed or dissolved between SUB-EST2024's January 1, 2024 boundary date and the gazetteer's January 1, 2025 cutoff. For those rows, geometry fields are NULL.

06The 2019 ↔ 2020 vintage seam

The most important caveat for any growth statistic that crosses 2019/2020. The chained 2010–2024 series is not a single continuous series.

Vintage 2019 estimated July 1, 2019 by extrapolating from the 2010 Census base. Vintage 2024 re-based to the 2020 Census on April 1, 2020 (ESTIMATESBASE2020) and produced July 1, 2020 from there. The two series are independent estimates of two different reference dates, produced by different methodology generations.

These deltas are a mixture of three distinct things: (1) real population change between April 2019 and April 2020; (2) methodology-rebase from V2019’s 2010-based extrapolation to V2024’s 2020-Census anchor; and (3) noise from the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance system, which is embedded in the blended base that PEP used as its 2020 starting point. None of these components can be cleanly separated after the fact. They are not a clean signal of any single thing.

07Derived field recipes

Every field in the public dataset is either copied directly from a Census source or computed by an exact formula. The build script implements exactly these recipes and nothing else.

Population fields (raw)

pop_2024

SUB-EST2024 POPESTIMATE2024 · July 1, 2024

pop_2020 … pop_2023

SUB-EST2024 POPESTIMATE{year} · July 1 of each year

pop_base_2020

SUB-EST2024 ESTIMATESBASE2020 · April 1, 2020 base

pop_2010 … pop_2019

SUB-EST2019 POPESTIMATE{year} · NULL if no V2019 record

pop_census_2010

SUB-EST2019 CENSUS2010POP parsed as int. NULL if value is "A" (place incorporated after 2010 census, 78 such places).

Within-vintage growth (never crosses the seam)

growth_2020_2024_abs

pop_2024 − pop_base_2020 · cumulative change from 2020-census base to mid-2024 estimate

growth_2020_2024_pct

100 × (pop_2024 − pop_base_2020) / pop_base_2020 · NULL when pop_base_2020 = 0

growth_2023_2024_abs / _pct

One-year change. Within V2024.

growth_2010_2019_abs / _pct

Within V2019. NULL if either endpoint is NULL.

Geometry fields

land_area_sqmi / water_area_sqmi

Gazetteer ALAND_SQMI / AWATER_SQMI. NULL if no gazetteer match.

density_per_sqmi

pop_2024 / land_area_sqmi · NULL if land_area_sqmi is 0 or NULL

lat / lon

Gazetteer INTPTLAT / INTPTLONG.

Rank fields

All ranks use standard competition ranking (“1224”): tied values share the lower rank and the next rank is skipped, matching what readers expect from “tied for 5th place.” Percent-growth rankings require pop_base_2020 ≥ 5,000 to keep tiny denominator artifacts off the leaderboards. A village that grows from 12 residents to 200 is not a fastest-growing city in any product sense.

08Update cadence

Annual. Vintage YYYY of SUB-EST is typically released in May of YYYY+1. When V2025 ships we re-fetch the source, re-run the build, and republish.

Mid-cycle. No mid-year revisions are expected. If Census issues a special revision (Population Estimates Challenge Program acceptance, special census), it is recorded in the build manifest with a reason.

2030 census. A new vintage family will eventually replace V2024. At that point V2024's 2020–2024 series may itself be revised in a re-base. This page will be updated to match.

09What this is NOT for

The trustworthiness of this site depends on saying “no” honestly when a use case is outside scope.

• Not a legal boundary source. Use TIGER/Line shapefiles for boundary geometry. Our centroids are points, not polygons.
• Not a demographic source. Race, age, income, housing, commuting, and language come from the American Community Survey (ACS) — a separate Census product not in V1.
• Not a metro-area source. “New York metropolitan area” (~19.5M) is a different geography from “New York city” (~8.5M). Our pop_2024 is city-proper.
• Not a county-level browser. County–place relationships are not in V1 because places can span counties (cf. Indianapolis SUMLEV=071 partition records).
• Not a CDP browser (except Urban Honolulu). For Silver Spring MD, Arlington VA, East Los Angeles CA, use the decennial census or ACS directly.
• Not a Northeast-MCD browser. Edison NJ, Hempstead NY, and Brookhaven NY are not in V1. Documented gap; planned for V2.
• Not a 2010–2024 growth source. See §06. Use 2010–2019 (V2019) or 2020–2024 (V2024), but not both.
• Not a margin-of-error source. PEP estimates do not carry published MOEs the way ACS does. Treat them as administrative best-estimates with implicit uncertainty.
• Not a U.S. territories source. Puerto Rico, USVI, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands are not in V1.
• Not a daytime or commuter population source. All figures are resident population (people who live there), not workplace or daytime population. For commuter-adjusted figures, use Census LEHD or ACS journey-to-work tables.
• Not appropriate for legislative apportionment. Use decennial census counts, not PEP estimates, for any purpose that requires legally authoritative population figures (redistricting, apportionment, grant formulas that specify decennial counts).
• Not a tract, block, or block-group source. PEP only produces subcounty estimates for general-purpose government units (places, MCDs). For sub-city geographies, use the decennial census or ACS.
• Not an immigrant, citizenship, or nativity breakdown. Race, Hispanic origin, nativity, and citizenship status at the city level come from ACS, not PEP.
• Not a source for places revised in subsequent vintages. Each new vintage revises all years back to 2020. A number published today may differ from the same city’s figure in next year’s vintage. Always cite the vintage year alongside any figure. (Example: Washington, DC’s Vintage 2024 estimate of 702,250 was later revised to 691,310 in Vintage 2025.)

10Attribution & reuse

U.S. Census Bureau publications are works of the United States Government and are in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). No license fee, no required attribution. We attribute anyway because credibility flows from sourcing.

Recommended attribution language for any republished extract:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division. Vintage V2024 Subcounty Resident Population Estimates. Geographic enrichment from the 2025 Census Gazetteer. Compiled and processed by Every City in the USA on 2026-05-11.

This site does not imply Census endorsement and must not. Census does not review or approve third-party uses of its data.

Every build is fully reproducible from the raw files recorded in MANIFEST.json (sha256, source URL, retrieval timestamp). The methodology PDF downloaded from Census at build time is also archived with its sha256 so any reader can verify that our description of the Census methodology matches the actual document we used.

11Known limitations

• MCDs (V2). The most consequential V1 gap. Tracked.
• Geometry for the 8 consolidated cities. Borrowed from the SUMLEV=162 balance entry; understates land area by the area of included enclaves.
• 3 SUB-EST2024 places without gazetteer match. Geometry is NULL for these. Re-checked per release.
• CDP coverage (other than Urban Honolulu) is by design. Not a gap, but worth restating.
• Slug uniqueness may need to be re-evaluated when MCDs are added in V2.
• Disclosure Avoidance noise sensitivity for small places. The 2020 Census TopDown algorithm injects differential-privacy noise into place-level counts. For places over 50,000 the mean absolute error is on the order of 10 people; for places under 1,000 it is roughly 2 people in absolute terms but proportionally much larger. This noise is embedded in the blended base that PEP uses. Treat very small city figures as directionally correct, not precise.
• Estimates are revised in subsequent vintages. Each annual release revises all years back to the base year. The city-level figure for a given year may shift meaningfully between Vintage 2024 and Vintage 2025. This site will always use the most recent vintage available, but archived pages or cached data may carry earlier figures. Always check the “Last built” date at the top of this page.
• “City proper” vs. metro-area trap. A city rank by pop_2024 is a rank of the city-proper population. San Antonio (~1.5M) is a single large incorporated city; the San Antonio metro area (CBSA) adds surrounding counties. Readers who want metro-level comparisons need CBSA/OMB data, not this dataset.

For the full source list with file sizes, sha256s, and retrieval timestamps, see /sources/.