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The state of North Carolina: A people magnet
- Details
- Tuesday, 10 February 2026
- Written by Margaret Dickson
As a relatively new grandmother, I get frequent “growing like a weed” comments, and my grandbabies are doing just that—getting bigger and better every day.
So too is their home state, a fact that warms this tarheel-born and-bred writer’s heart.
Recent data from the US Census Bureau confirms that North Carolina bounced into the fastest growing state spot in 2025 with a whopping 84,000 new residents, bumping both Texas (2024) and Florida (2023) down the line. We now have nearly 11.2 million residents, with most of our growth coming from what demographers call “domestic migration,” people leaving other states to come to North Carolina. Some projections have us passing Georgia and Ohio to become the 7th largest state in the early 2030s. There is also the possibility of enhanced political clout at the national level with an additional seat in Congress based on our population boom.
And who is coming?
Many are people interested in high-paying jobs in banking and in technology. They may actually “work” in another state through remote communications, but want to live and raise families here. Access to both the ocean and mountains, cities large enough to have attractive amenities but are not metropolises, and temperate weather are big draws. Retirees are coming for many of the same reasons.
Population growth is clearly desirable in all sorts of ways—an expanding economy with more workers, additional investment and tax base, and more consumers to purchase goods and services. Our incoming residents are also likely to be more diverse culturally and educationally than our native population, which makes North Carolina a more interesting place to be.
Growth brings its challenges as well.
More people mean more public needs, including public services like roads, bridges, and public transit. Rush hour in Charlotte, Raleigh, and—yes, Fayetteville—confirms this in about 30 seconds. Our new residents need places to live, which can drive up both demand for housing and its affordability. More people call for both more and more extensive health care options, and children they bring with them need more, and in many cases, better schools. More people generate urban sprawl that eats into natural areas and farm lands and creates various environmental issues, as we have seen in both our mountains and our coastal areas.
Most of our new residents are drawn to urban centers, both for jobs and for culture. This means they spend their money there, further exacerbating North Carolina’s increasingly clear urban-rural divide. Urban areas with larger tax bases and more educated residents are thriving, while rural areas can rarely compete with the schools, health care, and amenities of our cities. Political and cultural conflicts can be threatening and highly divisive.
All of which is to say, North Carolina’s future requires smart planning at both the state and local levels. Our General Assembly must be willing to invest in our state’s infrastructure, both in cities and in rural areas, instead of cutting budgets and giving tax breaks to top earners and corporations, many of which are based outside North Carolina. It must stop starving public education and sending our tax dollars to barely regulated private schools, many of them with a religious slant. Local governments must be creative in attracting new residents to their areas and persistent in their efforts to provide quality education and health care.
The bottom line here is that if North Carolina does not continue to offer a high quality of life attractive to newcomers, some of our “domestic migrants” are going to politely migrate to some other state that does.
