After a sharp decline during the pandemic, the San Francisco metro area’s population failed to grow again in 2025, despite a swelling boom in AI. Unlike in almost every other major metro in the country, that’s left the region’s total population well below its 2020 level, according to newly released U.S. Census estimates.
The number of residents in the San Francisco metropolitan area, which also includes the East Bay, Peninsula and Marin County, was still 2.6% less in July 2025 than it was in April 2020, the most recent metro-level data show. Among metro areas with more than 1.5 million residents, that population loss is only outpaced by Los Angeles, which was down 2.7%.
The San Jose metro area, which spans Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, saw a slightly smaller dip over the five year span, with its July 2025 estimate coming in at 0.8% smaller than its April 2020 estimate.
Elsewhere across the Sun Belt, Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio in Texas, Jacksonville and Orlando in Florida and Charlotte in North Carolina all saw growth rates at or above 10% over the same time frame.
The data underscore how the rapid changes brought on by the pandemic in 2020 have continued to have lasting effects in the Bay Area, where remote work has firmly taken hold, allowing workers to leave the area for cheaper homes elsewhere. On top of that, states like Texas are also building housing at a far faster pace than the Bay Area. Even affluent coastal places more similar to the Bay, like Boston and Seattle, are outpacing the region when it comes to new homes.
That has aligned with population growth. Both the Boston and Seattle metro areas, which have a similar population to the San Francisco metro, were above their April 2020 population levels as of 2025: Boston’s population grew by 1.8%, while Seattle’s grew by 3.6%.
Each of the fastest growing places saw influxes of both international migrants and domestic movers from other cities and states, the data shows. San Francisco and Los Angeles, on the other hand, each saw far more residents leave than come in.
Still, it’s not as though the Bay Area’s population has been in freefall since the pandemic. After hitting a low in 2022, the population growth in both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas has generally leveled off, even creeping up slightly. Likewise, Los Angeles’s population change has generally leveled off around its lowest point.
And between 2024 and 2025, population growth slowed in the majority of the country’s metro areas, particularly those along the U.S.-Mexico border, largely due to a decrease in international migration. The data, which goes through July 2025, only capture a few months of Trump’s aggressive immigration policies and could be an early indicator of how the tactics will continue to impact the country’s population.