Migration gets all the attention. But for much of Greater Minnesota, the more powerful — and more permanent — force reshaping population is happening in the columns most people skip: births and deaths.
September 2026
Every population conversation in Minnesota eventually turns to migration. Are people leaving? Are they coming back? Is the Twin Cities gaining at rural Minnesota’s expense, or the other way around? It’s an understandable focus — migration is visible, it makes headlines, and it moves quickly enough to feel newsworthy from one year to the next.
But population change is made up of two components, not one. The first is natural change — the simple difference between births and deaths in a given place and year. The second is migration change — the net effect of people moving in and out, both domestically and internationally. Add the two together and you get total population change.
For decades, natural change was the boring half of that equation. Births reliably outpaced deaths almost everywhere, so migration was the only component doing much moving. That is no longer true. As Minnesota’s population has aged and birth rates have declined, natural change has become an active — and in a growing number of places, negative — force of its own. In several parts of Greater Minnesota, natural change is now working against population growth, not for it, which means migration isn’t just adding to growth anymore — in many places, it’s the only thing keeping population from falling.
To see how this is playing out, we grouped Minnesota’s 87 counties using the Minnesota State Demographic Center’s four Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) categories — entirely rural, town/rural mix, urban/town/rural mix, and entirely urban — and tracked both components of change from 2001 through 2025.
Click here for a description of RUCA categories.
Natural Change: Deaths Are Catching Up to Births Almost Everywhere
Start with the basic ingredients: births and deaths. Across every RUCA category, the pattern is the same in direction, even if the categories differ sharply in degree — births have been trending down since the mid-to-late 2000s, while deaths have been trending up, a straightforward reflection of an aging population (Figure 1).
The consequences of that squeeze are furthest along in entirely rural counties. Deaths have outnumbered births in entirely rural Minnesota in every single year of our data, going back to 2001. The gap has narrowed and widened along the way — natural change came closest to balancing out in 2019, at just -51, before COVID-era mortality pushed it back out to -434 in 2021 — but entirely rural Minnesota has not seen a year of natural increase in a quarter century.
Town/rural mix counties show what happens when that crossing point actually arrives. These counties ran a comfortable natural surplus for most of the 2000s and 2010s — as high as +2,600 in 2008 — but that cushion eroded steadily as births fell and deaths climbed. In 2021, town/rural mix counties crossed into negative natural change for the first time in our data, and they have stayed there every year since, most recently at -556 in 2025.
Even Minnesota’s more urbanized counties aren’t exempt — they’re just further from the edge. Urban/town/rural mix counties still post a natural surplus every year, but it has been shrinking for two decades: from a peak of +6,009 in 2007 down to just +260 in 2022, before ticking back up modestly to +922 in 2025. That 2022 figure is a reminder of how close even these more urbanized counties came to their own crossing point. Entirely urban counties have the largest cushion by far, but even there, natural change has been cut by more than half — from a peak of +28,601 in 2007 to roughly +12,000 in recent years.
Figure 1: Annual births, deaths and the natural change (births minus deaths). Data: U.S. Census Bureau – Population and Housing Unit Estimates, Components of Change
The upshot: natural change, once a reliable source of population growth almost everywhere in Minnesota, is now flat or negative across most of the state’s geography. That leaves migration — once the more volatile, secondary component — as the piece doing most of the work of keeping populations stable or growing.
Migration Change: Better Than the 2000s, But Uneven
If natural change is the slow-moving structural story, migration is the noisier one — and the noise itself tells us something.
Look first at the 2000s. Domestic migration — people moving between Minnesota counties and other states — was a persistent drag on entirely rural and town/rural mix counties for most of that decade, and it deepened heading into the Great Recession: town/rural mix counties lost as many as 4,290 more domestic movers than they gained in a single year (2009), and urban/town/rural mix counties saw domestic losses top 5,000 in 2012 (Figure 2).
Starting around the mid-2010s, that trend began to turn. Net migration for town/rural mix counties, which had been solidly negative for most of the prior decade, edged toward positive territory by 2016 to 2018, aided by growing international migration. Urban/town/rural mix counties saw a similar shift, moving from net migration losses in the thousands in the early 2010s to consistent net gains by 2017 and 2018.
Then came the pandemic. In 2021, net migration spiked sharply upward in rural and town/rural mix counties — entirely rural counties posted their strongest net migration in the dataset (+583), and town/rural mix counties saw net migration jump to +3,077 and then +3,873 the following year — while entirely urban counties saw the mirror image, with domestic out-migration cratering to nearly -23,000 in 2021 alone.
That rural spike has since settled. It hasn’t disappeared. Net migration for town/rural mix counties in 2024 and 2025 (+2,120 and +1,796) remains well above anything seen in the 2000s or early 2010s, even if it’s off its 2022 peak. Entirely rural counties’ net migration has cooled closer to flat (+82 in 2024, +31 in 2025) — modest, but a meaningful improvement over the routine losses of 300 to 900 people a year that characterized most of the 2000s.
International migration deserves its own mention here. It has grown from a minor contributor to a decisive one, especially outside entirely rural counties. Town/rural mix counties saw international migration nearly quadruple from 686 in 2019 to 2,719 in 2024. Entirely urban counties saw international migration reach 27,072 in 2024 alone — the largest single-year figure in the entire dataset for any category — which is the main reason entirely urban counties posted record net migration of +24,325 that year, even as domestic migration stayed negative.
Figure 2: Annual net international, domestic, and total migration. Data: U.S. Census Bureau – Population and Housing Unit Estimates, Components of Change
Putting the Two Together: Who’s Being Offset, and Who Isn’t
Once you look at natural change and migration change together, the picture sharpens considerably — and it looks different in each RUCA category.
In entirely rural counties, migration’s recent improvement has helped, but it hasn’t been enough to fully offset a natural change deficit that has held steady in the -300 range for years. Even with positive net migration in 2024 and 2025, the natural change loss dominates: total population change in entirely rural counties has been negative in 22 of the last 25 years.
Town/rural mix counties show the opposite dynamic. As natural change flipped negative starting in 2021, migration didn’t just soften the blow — it overcompensated. Net in-migration of roughly 1,800 to 3,900 a year since 2021 has more than covered a natural change loss of 500 to 1,200, turning what would otherwise be population decline into consistent, meaningful growth.
Urban/town/rural mix counties are increasingly leaning on the same lever. Natural change here is still positive, but it has thinned to the point where it’s a minor contributor most years; in 2022, natural change added only 260 people while net migration added 8,304 — migration is now doing the overwhelming majority of the work, even in counties that aren’t losing natural population yet.
Entirely urban counties still benefit from both components in most years, but the balance is shifting. Natural change alone used to be enough to guarantee growth; now, in a year like 2021, when domestic out-migration turned sharply negative, entirely urban counties actually lost population overall (-5,862) despite a still-solid natural increase of 12,830 — something that would have been almost unthinkable a decade earlier.
Figure 3: Net migration and natural change by RUCA category. Data: U.S. Census Bureau – Population and Housing Unit Estimates, Components of Change
Total Population Change: A State Increasingly Held Up by Migration
Add natural change and net migration together, and the last two decades tell a clear story about where Minnesota’s population growth is actually coming from — and where it isn’t.
Entirely rural Minnesota remains the outlier: population there has declined in most years of the last quarter century, and neither the recent improvement in migration nor any realistic near-term shift in natural change looks likely to reverse that on its own. Town/rural mix counties have genuinely turned a corner since 2021, but that turn was built almost entirely on migration, arriving at precisely the moment natural change gave out. Urban/town/rural mix and entirely urban counties are still growing, and growing by more people in absolute terms than anywhere else in the state — but a shrinking share of that growth is coming from natural increase, and a growing share is coming from international migration in particular.
Figure 4: Annual population change by RUCA category. Data: U.S. Census Bureau – Population and Housing Unit Estimates, Components of Change
Put simply: the natural-change cushion that used to make population growth close to automatic in most of Minnesota is disappearing. Where that cushion is gone or nearly gone, migration — and increasingly, international migration specifically — isn’t a supplement to growth. It’s the whole ballgame.
That has real implications well beyond the population count itself: workforce availability, school enrollment, health care and long-term care capacity, and local tax bases all move with these same trends. As we continue this analysis, the next question worth asking isn’t just whether a county is gaining or losing people — it’s which component is driving that outcome, because the policy response to a natural-change problem looks nothing like the policy response to a migration problem.