Lower Merion benefited from a pandemic-era pull to the suburbs. It’s continuing to grow.

Lower Merion’s population is continuing to grow, slowly but steadily. That’s according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Between July 2023 and July 2024, Lower Merion gained 455 residents, a 0.71% increase, bringing its population to 64,702. The township has gained an estimated 1,074 residents since 2020 and 6,718 since 2010, marking a positive shift after decades of stagnation.

Lower Merion benefited during and after the pandemic, as residents left city centers and relocated to the suburbs, said Kevin Gillen, senior research fellow at Drexel University’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation. Between 2021 and 2022, Philadelphia lost about 20,000 residents, the largest one-year decline in decades. Last year, the city’s numbers finally started to rebound.

Gillen said Philadelphians and outsiders — especially transplants from New York City — were drawn to suburban communities like Lower Merion in the post-pandemic period. Many wanted bigger backyards and high-quality schools and were no longer tied to five-days-a-week in-office requirements.

“Lower Merion is attractive, especially because it still has proximity to the city, it’s leafy, it’s green, it’s nice, it has low crime, it has great schools,” Gillen said. “So it offers a lot of things.”

Unfortunately, Gillen said, housing affordability in Lower Merion has only decreased as demand has increased, making it more and more difficult for new residents, especially young people, to settle down in the township.

The median sales price for a home in Lower Merion was $803,500 in 2024. The median sales price across Montgomery County was a little more than half that, at $457,000.

“The Main Line has always been affluent, and its affluence has increased exponentially since COVID due to housing unaffordability,” Gillen said.

Lower Merion’s growth tracks with greater trends in the Philly suburbs. Since April 2020, South Jersey has gained 33,656 residents and Philly’s Pennsylvania-side suburbs have gained 60,632.

Through the beginning of the 20th century, Lower Merion was a sparsely populated region sought out by wealthy Philadelphians as a site to build country estates. Following national patterns of suburbanization, the township’s population grew rapidly in the years after World War I. Lower Merion gained nearly 40,000 residents between 1920 and 1970, due in large part to highway construction and the growth of commuter travel along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1970, Lower Merion’s population reached 63,594 residents, and by 1980, the market value of all assessed taxable real property in the township reached $1.56 billion — third highest in the state, after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — according to the Lower Merion Historical Society. Yet by the 1980s, Lower Merion’s population boom had slowed. The township experienced a stagnant period that lasted through the mid-2000s, as its population fluctuated around, but did not surpass, 60,000 residents. In 2008, Lower Merion reported 57,865 residents, below its pre-1960 levels.

Since the late 2000s, the township has seen steady growth. In 2019, it surpassed Bensalem in population, making it the second-largest suburban municipality in the area, after Upper Darby.