questioned for years the accuracy of the 2020 census<\/a>. A lingering sense it left the region undercounted remains among those skeptics.<\/p>\nSubsequent updates and revisions, including the recently released estimates, likely corrected some of the potential accuracy issues, \u201cbut not entirely,\u201d Ooms said. \u201cI still think we\u2019re undercounted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, Ooms said people moving into the region from other, generally more-expensive areas \u2014 New York City, Philadelphia, their suburbs and the Lehigh Valley, for example \u2014 is largely driving the trend of modest population growth reflected in the data.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd while a lot of it has to do with costs, cost of living, some of it has to do with housing,\u201d Ooms said. \u201cThat\u2019s another reason why our housing market has been going crazy and will continue to do so until we\u2019re able to start developing more residential properties and more infill development and more adaptive reuse.\u201d<\/p>\n
The flexibility that remote work affords people when deciding where to live also likely contributed to local population growth, she said. The beginning of the decade featured a pandemic-prompted explosion of remote and hybrid work opportunities, allowing for more movement among workers not tethered to a particular city or region by their jobs.<\/p>\n
Ooms expects the growing-population trend to continue as Northeast Pennsylvania employers strive to meet workforce demands and address a relative shortage of skilled labor. She reiterated the need to bolster residential housing stock in local counties to accommodate that continued growth.<\/p>\n
Declines<\/p>\n
In Monroe, Susquehanna and Wyoming counties, where the estimated populations shrunk overall between 2020 and 2025, the declines were modest, too.<\/p>\n
Monroe County\u2019s population dropped from 168,292 as of April 1, 2020, to 167,179 as of July 1, 2025, a roughly 0.7% decline. But despite shrinking overall during that period, Monroe\u2019s population increased modestly in recent years.<\/p>\n
Its estimated population as of July 1, 2023, for example, was 166,762. That number increased to 166,818 as of July 1, 2024, and again to the 167,179 figure last year.<\/p>\n
Over the broader period between 2020 and 2025,\u00a0Wyoming County\u2019s population dropped by about 1.1%, from 26,072 to 25,790, while Susquehanna\u2019s dropped by 0.5%, from 38,431 to 38,237.<\/p>\n
Susquehanna County\u2019s estimated population increased nominally between July 2024 and July 2025, by about 0.1%. Wyoming County\u2019s shrunk by about 0.3%, the estimates show.<\/p>\n
Recent population estimates and other datasets are available online at census.gov<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The individual populations of Lackawanna, Luzerne, Pike, Schuylkill and Wayne counties grew overall between 2020 and 2025 while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[201,182,803,2941,139,28,4399,231,178,180,179,729,1481,2943],"class_list":["post-152436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-luzerne-county","tag-monroe-county","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pike-county","tag-schuylkill-county","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-uncategorized","tag-wayne-county","tag-wyoming-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}