The U.S. Census Bureau released its latest estimates of county-level population growth and the CRER has released a new white paper from center director and chief economist Howard Wall. Along with other areas in central and eastern Tennessee, the Chattanooga metro area saw its population grow at more than twice the national rate between 2020 and 2025, and it should cross the 600,000 threshold sometime in the late summer of 2026.
The main source of this growth was net migration from other areas of the country. As a group, the metro area’s three Tennessee counties grew by 6.6 percent, with a 5 percent rate of domestic migration. The three Georgia counties grew by only 2.8 percent, but had a 4.5 percent rate of domestic migration. International migration was the main source of population growth for the country as a whole, but was a relatively minor factor in the Chattanooga region. Even so, the relatively small foreign-born population in the Chattanooga metro area grew by about 25 percent.