Census: South Carolina population grows to 5.4M

(The Center Square) – South Carolina as gained population since 2020, according to a new U.S. Census report.

The state has grown from 5.1 million people on April 1, 2020, to 5.4 million on July 1, 2024, the Census estimates.

“It’s been almost like clockwork, every 10 years, almost like clockwork, we gain a half million people,” Jerry Mitchell, a professor of geography at the University of South Carolina, told The Center Square.

It’s not all retirees moving South to enjoy the beaches of South Carolina, the professor said.

Some of that growth has actually been spillover from North Carolina and Georgia, Mitchell said.

“There’s a small county on the Savannah River called McCormick,” Mitchell said. “McCormick is right across the river from Augusta, Ga. It’s rural, it’s on a river, there’s lakes, but it’s close to a hospital, it’s close to an airport.”

Parts of South Carolina are benefiting from the growth of Charlotte, he added.

“You see a lot of growth in York County, between Rock Hill and Lancaster,” he said.

There is also solid growth around Greenville and Spartanburg, Mitchell said. In between those bands of growth, there are areas in decline, the professor said.

“We have something that I tell my students is basically like a striping,” he said. “If you picture the state, in our head, there is a stripe across the upstate, the I-85 corridor, that is growing,” he said. “You drop down to the next set of counties, they are in decline.”

In the middle of the state the I-20 corridor is growing, followed by another area in decline and then the coastal counties, which are growing.

“It’s grow, no grow, grow,” Mitchell said.

Allendale County, the state’s least populated, has only 8,000 people.

“Just my college here – Arts and Sciences, not the entire university – has more people in it,” Mitchell said.

South Carolina’s population growth has been the result of migration into the state, Daniel Tompkins, a statistician with the South Carolina Department of Revenue, told The Center Square.

“As a whole, we have had more deaths than births in South Carolina since 2020,” Tomkins said. “Obviously, COVID-19 sparked that. We have been kind of getting back to even. But even before COVID, the trend of births and deaths kind of matching each other has been going on for a decade or so.”

• By David Beasley | The Center Square contributor