Reduced immigration and net out-migration are slowing growth in the DMV region

As of October 2026, the second Trump administration has been in office for 21 months. In that short period of time, the metropolitan area home to the nation’s capital (known locally as the “DMV” for its components, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) has been measurably changed.

While some of the administration’s local efforts are symbolic and ephemeral (such as celebrating the United States’ 250th anniversary with special events), other changes might be more durable. Beyond site-specific proposals, such as the potential demolition of the Kennedy Center and construction of other proposed monumental projects in and around the District, the Trump administration’s unique local impact is now more clearly economic and demographic.

In 2025, the DMV region lost more jobs than any other metro area nationwide—losses that reached beyond the federal government and into the private sector. And while unemployment has ticked up nationwide, it has surged in the DMV region, especially among Black workers. Additionally, local home sales have jumped, and visitor spending in the District is down.

Now, the most recent Census Bureau data releases are the first opportunity to understand the demographic impacts of the second Trump administration on the region’s population. This report examines DMV regional population trends in the context of other major metro areas, highlights additional related economic data, and looks inside the region to understand what these trends mean for local jurisdictions and, in particular, our region’s immigrant population. We find that:

• The first year of the Trump administration saw a growth slowdown in major U.S. metro areas. The DMV region’s population trajectory is slowing, and falls in the middle of the pack for major metro areas.
• Following national trends, immigration’s contribution to the DMV region’s growth dropped in 2024-25. In 2025, the DMV region was the only major metro area where the largest immigrant country-of-origin group relied on Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
• On the domestic side, a few of the region’s core jurisdictions—the District, Fairfax County, Va., and Alexandria, Va.—lost many more residents on net to domestic migration in 2024-25 than in 2023-24.

While cities and regions all around the country are affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies, the DMV region’s state and local leaders should be aware that there are some unique implications for this area. In addition, lost domestic population strongly suggests that the activities of DOGE and other cuts in 2025 caused some talent to leave or refrain from moving to the region. The DMV region’s elected, philanthropic, and business leaders have options to mitigate these impacts and invest in future growth by targeting efforts to connect young people and immigrants with opportunities.

The DMV region’s population growth is slowing

In a recent Brookings analysis, demographer William H. Frey found that major U.S. metropolitan areas’ population growth slowed dramatically in 2024-25. In fact, Cleveland is the only major U.S. metro area that grew faster in 2024-25 than in 2023-24. (Hyphenated dates denote data referencing a period of time from July 1 to June 30 throughout this piece.)

Despite leading the nation in regional job loss and experiencing an accompanying surge in unemployment, the DMV region’s population growth trajectory was only moderately weak (Figure 1). Across 56 major U.S. metro areas, the median metro area’s growth declined 37% between 2023-24 and 2024-25. While the DMV region is still gaining population, its rate of growth slowed by 42%—putting the region just behind the middle of the pack on growth trajectory.

Population growth slowed between 2023-24 and 2024-25 across all but three counties in the DMV region. The region’s core counties saw the largest growth declines. Montgomery County, Md., was the hardest hit, followed by the District of Columbia, Alexandria, Va., Fairfax County, Va., and Prince George’s County, Md.

As a group, core DMV counties experienced an average drop in population growth of 38%, compared to a 30% drop in outer counties’ growth. The geographic distribution of these declines is particularly notable because the core remains the center of growth for the DMV region, with Fairfax County, Va., Loudoun County, Va., and Prince George’s County, Md., leading the region in numeric population gain. Table 1 gives a complete set of statistics for growth share and change for each county and county-equivalent in the DMV region, with all Virginia independent cities except for the city of Alexandria aggregated with their historic county of origin for readability.

The role of immigration in DMV regional demographics

As of 2024, foreign-born residents made up 24% of the DMV region’s population—the sixth-largest foreign-born share among U.S. metro areas with populations over 1 million (Figure 2). In the decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration gradually became a more important component of the DMV region’s growth, as net domestic migration (the number of people moving into the DMV region from other places in the U.S., minus the number moving out of the DMV region to other places in the U.S.) has been negative since 2014. (Though it is also worth noting that domestic migration remains positive in all but one of the DMV region’s non-core counties.)

A subsequent drop in the region’s rate of natural population increase (the number of births minus the number of deaths) after the pandemic and a surge in immigration during the Biden administration made immigration the single-largest source of regional population growth. This evolution is illustrated in Figure 3.

Because of their relative youth and high levels of labor force participation, immigrants represent an even higher share of the DMV region’s workforce than its population. Their role in the region’s economy varies by sector. The region’s immigrant workers are more likely to work in construction, transportation, and hospitality than in other industries (Figure 4).

The construction sector’s steep reliance on immigrant labor—with over half of the workforce composed of people born outside the U.S.—stands out. The Trump administration’s immigration policies thus represent a major risk to a critical sector for the DMV region: Construction was the region’s fastest-growing sector in 2025, and given the centrality of the housing supply crisis in the region’s economic growth, a major labor disruption in this sector will all but certainly set back affordability and productivity for the whole region.

A recent analysis of ICE arrest data and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages found a surge in ICE enforcement activity in the DMV region beginning in February 2025 (Figure 5). The authors estimated there were 10,032 arrests between January 2025 and July 2026—about 9,050 more than the baseline volume in 2024. In a pooled analysis across the 64 cities where enforcement surged most, the authors found a corresponding drop in employment approximately four times larger than the actual volume of arrests—implying that for every arrest, four formal jobs disappeared six months after the onset of enforcement. Some of these exiting workers may be immigrants avoiding harassment, detainment, or even deportation. In addition, research identifies a loss of jobs for U.S.-born workers due to lost spending and business disruption from missing labor. This is consistent with news reports highlighting impacts on the construction sector in particular.

Between 2023-24 and 2024-25, international immigration to the DMV region fell from 80,044 people to 44,804—a loss of 44%. Most of the slowdown in the region’s overall growth in 2024-25 is due to this decline, consistent with the trend for major U.S. metro areas and immigration’s emergence as the main source of population growth for the DMV region in the years following the pandemic.

A majority of the DMV region’s immigrants live in just three jurisdictions: Fairfax (24%), Montgomery (23%), and Prince George’s counties (16%), as shown in Figure 6. Census data show 62% of the region’s drop in immigration hit these same three counties: Prince George’s County (24%), Fairfax County (20%), and Montgomery County (19%). These core suburbs are thus experiencing the brunt of policy changes impacting existing immigrants and future immigration.

The most common country of origin for immigrants in the DMV region is El Salvador (Figure 2), and the region’s Salvadoran population is anchored in the Maryland suburbs (Map 1). Many Salvadorans in the DMV region rely on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in order to legally live and work in the U.S. TPS offers temporary immigration arrangements for foreign nationals from select countries facing armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary events that could pose serious threats to their safe return. The program entails both a work permit and deportation protection.

On September 9, 2026, El Salvador’s TPS designation expired, but Salvadorans with TPS currently retain permission to work and protection from deportation via a temporary extension. Thus, it is currently unclear what will happen to TPS for El Salvador in the short to medium term.

The region’s core jurisdictions lost more residents on net to domestic migration in 2024-25

Especially during the immediate post-pandemic period, steep negative net domestic migration (Figure 3) led to “historic” population losses in the city and region. From 2023-24 to 2024-25, net domestic migration in the DMV region and most of its jurisdictions was relatively stable, with more people leaving the region for other parts of the country than moving here.

There are four notable exceptions to this pattern: the District of Columbia, the city of Alexandria, Fairfax County, and Prince George’s County.

The first three jurisdictions lost more people on net to domestic migration in 2024-25 than in 2023-24. This is because either fewer people are moving to these jurisdictions from other places in the U.S., or because more people are leaving them for other places. We do not know which dynamic is more at play because the Census Bureau does not disaggregate the components of domestic migration. Job trends such as the AI-driven slowdown in entry-level jobs hiring could be causing fewer new residents, such as young people, to move to the region (as the D.C. Policy Center highlighted in a recent report). In addition, federal workers unable to find new work and contractors seeing fewer funding opportunities could be choosing to leave the region.

In Prince George’s County, where net domestic out-migration remained very high in the post-pandemic period, net out-migration slowed in 2024-25. One likely explanation is residents leaving the District of Columbia and Montgomery County for Prince George’s County. Historically, there has been a connection between negative migration in the District and Montgomery County and positive migration in Prince George’s County.

Discussion and recommendations

This analysis raises existential questions about the future of growth in the DMV region: Where is it going to come from, and how are we going to build for it?

Negative net domestic migration means the region is losing more residents than it is gaining from other parts of the U.S. The region has already responded to this trend by rolling out TalentCapital.AI, an online workforce hub. Leaders may want to consider a similar campaign targeted at young people, perhaps in partnership with higher education institutions and employers that offer internships, as the Campus Philly initiative in the Philadelphia area does.

However, the net population impacts of lost immigration are an order of magnitude larger for the region than the drop in domestic migration. It is vital that leaders understand the regional impacts of changes to immigration policy—not only the effects on immigrant households, but also the second-order effects on the entire regional economy due to lower workforce participation and lost economic activity from immigrant entrepreneurs (nearly all recent business growth in the DMV region comes from Latino or Hispanic owners).

Further immigration-related losses are likely to disproportionately hit the DMV region. According to the American Immigration Council, only four TPS designations have not yet been eliminated: El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine. And the DMV region is the only major metro area in which the largest immigrant population has roots in a TPS-designated country (El Salvador). This means that recent Trump administration actions to roll back TPS could have outsized effects on the DMV region. Mixed residency and work status is common in Salvadoran households, so even though many native Salvadorans in the U.S. are now U.S. citizens or permanent residents, their household well-being and ability to care for children, run businesses, and show up for work, school, and community obligations can still be disrupted by immigration enforcement actions or changes in TPS policy, because their lives are intertwined with directly impacted family and friends.

Government, philanthropy, and the private sector all have a role to play in meeting this moment by aiding the region’s immigrants and thus strengthening the entire region’s ability to evolve beyond the current shock. For example:

• Many regions have established resilience funds that can make grants to nonprofits that serve immigrants, offer emergency lending to immigrant-owned businesses, and even fund adaptation strategies such as digital modernization to help entrepreneurs do business online.
• Schools will need more resources to support U.S. citizen children whose parents have been deported in order to address declining graduation rates for those left-behind students. State governments should prioritize directing resources to programs such as AVID that support high school graduation, college attendance, and mental health, as the costs to government and lost productivity will only be greater over time if this population cannot fulfill their potential.
• While very little can help the construction sector in the near term, the region must mature and scale workforce development programs in the sector with urgency to address the medium and long term. A 2025 analysis by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments identified existing regional labor shortages in transportation and construction that would be greatly exacerbated by Salvadoran residents dropping out of the workforce. The same report highlighted the importance of workforce development programs to close these gaps—programs that are currently mainly undertaken at the jurisdictional level. The region must grow beyond these jurisdictional approaches in favor of an integrated regional effort supported by shared data, coordinated strategy with community colleges and the Workforce Investment Council, and pooled grantmaking that major employers have advocated for.

A robust evidence base from a variety of research perspectives indicates that regions, including the native-born workers residing in them, benefit from the economic boost that immigrants infuse into their new homes through higher wages, employment, productivity, and living standards for all. By responding to the challenges immigrants in the DMV region are facing, local leaders will strengthen the region for everyone.