New York State projections 2022 - 2050

Introduction and next steps

Population projections are estimates of how a population may change in the future, based on assumptions about fertility, mortality, and migration. They can help people understand the future size and structure of a population by age and sex. Population projections are used in planning, health care, etc. They can guide public policy if the future population has different needs than curently available, but public policy can also steer the population in a different direction if that is more desirable.

These projections are derived using a cohort-component model. The cohort-component model is based on the notion that population changes over time due to aging, births, deaths and people moving in and out. The model starts with a base population and estimates how it changes over time due to each of those components. These projection start with the population in 2022 and project the population into 2050.

The results presented here were derived in the Fall of 2024 and are provisionary in the sense that we already have plans to update some of the components in 2025 when more data becomes available.

What to find on these pages?

• Projection data tools
  Tools to interact with the data and create custom charts, and also a way to download the projection data.
• Analyses of trends
  Some of the results of these projections are compared with historic trends and we highlight our findings. These analsyes are organized by trends in the population and in each of the components of change.
• Methodology
  These sections describe the assumptions underlying the projections and how we derived these assumptions.

Scenarios

The future is inherently uncertain. Our projection model implemented a few levers that can be used to manipulate the set of assumptions at a high level and thus can give some insights in the sensitivity of the assumptions.

Demographic change in recent years was very different than we observed in the latter half of the previous decade. The Covid pandemic contributed greatly to those differences. We devised three scenarios for the demographic change from 2022-2050

Middle

This scenario assumes that demographic change will be similar to observed change pre-Covid. There is a short period in this scenario to transition from current change to the pre-Covid change.

Low

This scenario assumes that the current demographic change is more in line with projected change. It assumes lower fertility rates, higher mortality rates, less international migration and less favorable domestic migration than the middle series.

High

This scenario assumes that, as a result of policy and social changes demographic change is more favorable than the change that was observed pre-Covid.

Next steps

Regional and County projections
In the past we produced state pojections, where the state totals were the sum of the counties. We decided to reverse the process and produce State projections first and than use those projections as controls for Regional and County projections. This work will start soon after the State projections are published.

Revisions to the base population
We start our projections with the estimates for 2022 from the Census Bureau. The age characteristics in this estimates series use only under and over 18 information from the 2020 Census in their so-called blended base. In the near future the estimates base will be revised and with that the 2022 ages will differ. Hopefully at the state level the impact will not be great, but it will be a reason to revise these state projections.

Assumptions and scenarios
We constantly keep an eye on demographic change in New York State and if our projections are out of sync with the observed reality, the set of assumptions needs to be revisited which might lead to revision to the projections.