Tennessee Gained About 200 People a Day for Nine Years. Can You Guess What Drove It?

If it feels like you have more new neighbors every year, you’re probably right.

A Nashville research group looked at where Tennessee’s recent growth came from, and most of it traces back to people moving in.

Here’s what the numbers show for Tennesseans.

Who Did the Math and How

The Sycamore Institute describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan public policy research center in Nashville.

Mandy Spears and Robin Yeh wrote the Institute’s report, Who Are Tennesseans?, which was published in August 2026.

You can read the full report on the Institute’s site.

If you want the data behind it, the authors used U.S. Census Bureau population estimates for the state and its counties.

Then they sorted the change from 2016 to 2025 by source.

Those sources were net moves from other states, net moves from other countries, and births minus deaths.

Net means arrivals minus departures.

These are the report’s findings on how Tennessee grew and who lives there now, starting with where most of the growth came from.

Where the Growth Came From

The Sycamore Institute attributes 74% of Tennessee’s gain over that period to net domestic migration.

In all, the state added about 669,000 people over those years.

Net domestic migration is the difference between people moving into Tennessee from other states and people moving out.

The gains were largely the result of new residents from other states.

Another 20% came from net international migration, which covers people arriving from other countries.

Births minus deaths made up the rest, about 6%.

That’s the smallest slice.

How Fast the State Grew

Tennessee’s 10% gain between 2016 and 2025 works out to 1.0% a year on average, according to the Sycamore Institute.

That made Tennessee the 9th fastest-growing state in the country over the period.

A rate that sounds small adds up to about 669,000 more residents.

Memphis, by comparison, had 609,647 residents in July 2025.

If you live in Memphis, the state’s gain is larger than your whole city.

Spread across nine years, the gain comes to roughly 74,000 people a year.

If you count by the day, the state gained about 200 residents.

Gains and Losses by Place

Most of the state’s 95 counties gained people between 2016 and 2025, with 85 up and 10 down.

Wilson County grew 32% over those years, the report found, while Lake County shrank 17%.

The Census Bureau’s county estimates cover April 2020 to July 2025, a shorter window than the report’s, so the percentages don’t match.

Wilson County went from 147,745 residents in April 2020 to 175,033 in July 2025, an 18.5% increase of more than 27,000 residents.

Lake County went the other way, from 7,001 residents to 6,249, a loss of about 750 people.

Knoxville is up 6.0% since April 2020 and Memphis is down 3.0%.

If you live in one of the 10 counties that lost people, the statewide headline doesn’t describe your county.

You can look up your county on the QuickFacts pages, which list the same April 2020 and July 2025 figures.

Where People Cluster

The Sycamore Institute found that about 55% of Tennesseans lived in the state’s 10 most populous counties in 2025.

With about 7.3 million residents statewide, that works out to roughly 4 million people in 10 counties.

One-third lived in the 10 largest cities, or roughly 2.4 million people.

If you live outside those 10 counties, you’re part of the other 45%.

The five most populous counties are Shelby, Davidson, Knox, Hamilton and Rutherford, according to the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

If you’re wondering whether the biggest counties drive the growth, the latest numbers say not always.

From July 2024 to July 2025, Davidson County added 9,281 residents, the most of any county, while Shelby County lost 5,212.

The department attributes Davidson’s gain to international migration and natural increase.

Rural Land, Urban Residents

If you’re counting land instead of people, about 93% of Tennessee’s land area was classified as rural as of 2020, according to the report.

In 32 counties, every resident lived in a rural area that year.

Even so, about 66% of residents lived in urban areas as of 2020.

If you live in an urban area, you share the 7% or so of land that wasn’t classified as rural with roughly two of every three Tennesseans.

65-and-Older Group

The number of Tennesseans 65 and older grew 30% over the last decade, the Sycamore Institute found, faster than any other age group.

The state as a whole grew 10%.

That's about three times as fast.

The group's share of the population also rose from 15.7% to 18.6% between 2016 and 2025.

In 2016, roughly one in six Tennesseans was 65 or older.

By 2025, the share was a little under one in five.

The share varies by county.

In Census Bureau estimates for 2020 to 2024, 19.7% of residents in Lake County, which lost people, were 65 or older, compared with 17.0% in Wilson County, which grew.

If you're 65 or older, you belong to the age group that grew fastest in the state, and you're a bigger slice of the population than in 2016.

Growth Since 2020

Tennessee's population went from 6,912,319 in April 2020 to 7,315,076 in July 2025, according to Census Bureau estimates.

The state added more than 400,000 residents in about five years.

If you're wondering what that means for daily life, the report says trends like these shape demand for housing, infrastructure, workforce and public services.

Those effects vary based on local patterns and demographic characteristics.

Understanding these changes is important for policymakers as they decide how to allocate resources and plan for future demand.