South Carolina rockets past the rest of the South in growth. What’s driving it?

South Carolina may not have the largest population in the Southeast, but it had the entire country beat from 2024 to 2025.

According to a January 2026 United States Census Bureau report, the Palmetto State’s population grew 1.5% from July 1, 2024 to July 1, 2025. That was the largest growth rate in the country during the period studied.

This outpaced other hotspots like Idaho, North Carolina, Texas and Utah. The state’s population experienced a net domestic migration increase of 66,622 people.

A new report from the Census Bureau indicated the South as a whole was the only region of the country where all age groups were seeing population growth, almost doubling the national average growth rate of 3.1% with a 6% increase between 2020 to 2025.

Daniel Tompkins, a statistician who with the South Carolina Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office who helps run South Carolina’s branch of the Census Bureau’s State Data Center program, said the numbers have consistently shown South Carolina plays a large part in driving that growth.

“We’re not as big as Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, but I think the fact we’ve consistently been up at the top in terms of percent growth means we’re catching up with our neighbors,” Tompkins said. “It’s been pretty steady since 2020.”

Gilbert Tam, a 37-year-old physical therapist originally from Alameda, California, arrived in South Carolina in 2023 after previously living in St. Augustine, Florida.

Tam was joining his wife, whose job had transferred her to a Columbia office in 2022. Tam said that while he’d spent time in Charleston, the Midlands took some getting used to.

“It took me a bit of time just to realize that Columbia is Columbia,” Tam said. “Once I realized, once I accepted that it got a lot more comfortable. I started to enjoy it.”

Tam said that life in South Carolina has been noticeably more affordable than it was in both California and Florida, and that he had little desire to move back to his home state.

“I don’t really see myself moving back west, especially to the coastal cities,” Tam said. “I still love to visit, my family and friends are out there. But after getting a taste of living in areas that are more affordable, have a lot more space and a lot less traffic, it’s kind of hard to go back to the lifestyle we had back in California.”

The Census Bureau’s report noted outlying counties, accessible from but distinctly outside major metro areas, are the biggest drivers of growth. Tompkins said this certainly applies to South Carolina.

“We see the traditional population centers like Charleston or Beaufort or Greenville growing at a slower rate than their bordering counties,” Tompkins said. “For Richland we see Kershaw growing faster. For Charleston, Dorchester and Berkeley are growing faster. Jasper’s growing faster than Beaufort, Spartanburg’s growing faster than Greenville.”

Tompkins said age demographics are a very important consideration when analyzing growth, and that communities need to account for the implications of certain groups outnumbering others and strive to keep growth sustainable.

“Horry is a good example, Jasper is a good example where there are a lot of people moving there, but they tend to be up in those older age groups,” Tompkins said. “You see the retired population gaining on the workforce population pretty quickly. So places like that will want to think about how do we attract or keep more of our workforce here to support this ballooning retired population we have.”

Tam said that for him, the South has lived up to the hype for him so far.

“The Southeast people are generally very welcoming, very kind,” Tam said. “That’s something that was new for me and I do enjoy that a lot. I try to give back that same energy to the community too.”