by Art Woolf

It’s hard to put a positive spin on the 2025 county population estimates for Vermont just released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Earlier this year the Census Bureau told us Vermont’s total population declined in 2025 by the largest percentage of any state. Now we know that only five of the state’s fourteen counties exhibited any population growth last year. All four of the state’s southernmost counties—Windsor, Windham, Rutland, and Bennington—lost population. In the Northeast Kingdom, Caledonia and Orleans Counties had fewer residents in 2025 than in 2024. Within the Kingdom only tiny Essex County added people.

In northwest Vermont, Grand Isle and Franklin Counties grew, but not by much. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the Census report was that Chittenden County, the financial and economic center of the state, and home to more than one-quarter of the state’s population, suffered a significant decline of 0.3%.

We are now halfway through the 2020s so these population estimates are midway between the 2020 Census count and the upcoming 2030 count. Since the 2020 Census the U.S. population growth has been ten times that of Vermont (3.1% compared to 0.3%). So far this decade, only Grand Isle County, with a total population about the same as the town of St. Albans, has grown faster than the U.S., and just barely. Five counties had fewer residents in 2025 than in 2020—the four southern counties and Washington County.

These population numbers show that the statewide population growth slowdown, a slowdown that has been occurring since the 1990s, is not reversing. And there are reasons to believe that Vermont’s actual population is lower than the intercensal Census estimates suggest.

The estimates are based on a variety of data sources the Census statisticians, economists, and demographers use. One of the most important is the 2020 Census count. But I believe (and I am in a minority of one) that the Census overcounted Vermont’s population by at least 6,000 people.

That may not seem like a large number, but the entire state population increased by only 17,000 from 2010 to 2020. My estimate of the 6,000 overcount hinges on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Census counted 6,000 more people living in nineteen Vermont ski towns in 2020 compared to 2010. In the previous decade, those same ski towns lost more than 1,000 people. It’s hard to believe such a significant trend reversal happened.

I believe that many vacation homeowners fled their primary residences at the start of the pandemic in March and April 2020, when there was tremendous uncertainty and fear about what was going on. People wanted to escape relatively crowded urban and suburban environments and moved to the vacation homes they owned.

On the 2020 Census forms, which went out in April, one of the questions asked for the usual place of residence on April 1. I think a lot of Covid migrants wrote down their current place of residence—their Vermont vacation home—not their year-round home. Hence, a big increase in ski town populations when the Census numbers were released.

There is no other evidence of an increase in those towns’ populations. No increase in student enrollment and no increase in Vermont income tax forms coming from people in those towns. If people came to Vermont during 2020 and even remained in 2021, they didn’t stay.

Vermont’s population growth in the 2010s came as a surprise to people when the 2020 Census numbers were released. The Census estimates during the 2010s suggested the state’s population was at best stagnant, or was declining. In 2015, based on the Census estimates at that time, we thought that nine Vermont counties had lost population since 2010. Today we think that five have lost population since 2020.

We were pleasantly surprised when the 2020 Census reported a 2.8% Vermont population increase. We may be in for an unpleasant surprise when the 2030 Census finds that those ski town populations were incorrect and 6,000 people we thought lived here did not.

Given that the state has only added 1,698 people since 2020, a decline of 6,000—or more if we include vacation homes in non-ski towns—it is very likely that Vermont will have fewer residents in 2030 than in 2020. And since most of the ski towns are in southern Vermont counties, their population picture will look even grimmer than it does today.