Philly remains the nation’s 6th-largest city, but its lead over No. 7 is narrowing

Philadelphia remains the sixth-most-populous city in the country, fending off fast-growing San Antonio, Texas, for another year. But Philly’s population gains coming out of the pandemic have been somewhat anemic compared with peer cities, and Alamo City continued to close the gap, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Between July 2023 and July 2024, Philadelphia gained roughly 10,500 residents, a 0.7% increase in its population and the first increase after four consecutive years of population losses. As a result, Philly’s population stood at 1,573,916 residents, about 1.9% lower than at the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Down south, though, San Antonio added nearly 24,000 residents between 2023 and 2024, bringing its population to 1,526,656, according to census estimates. That jump puts San Antonio within about 47,000 people of Philadelphia’s population, further narrowing the City of Brotherly Love’s lead.

And compared with other large peer cities, Philadelphia’s growth rate was among the lowest, and below the national average of 1% for cities with 50,000 or more residents, census estimates indicated. Cities of all sizes, however, showed faster growth and larger gains in 2024 compared with the previous year — which, in some ways, is still good news, even given Philadelphia’s apparent lag.

“Cities are popular in general, and are coming back generally from what had been a drop during the pandemic,” said Katie Martin, project director at the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative. “You just see some cities coming back a little more slowly than other areas.”

San Antonio has been gaining on Philly’s population for years, but in 2024, the gap became narrower than it has ever been — and drastically less than it was at the start of the pandemic. In 2020, Philadelphia had roughly 161,000 more residents than San Antonio.

Since 2020, San Antonio’s population has grown by about 6.4% — the most of any of the 10 largest cities, Martin said — compared with Philadelphia’s decline of 1.9% during that time period. In 2024, San Antonio had the fourth-largest numerical population increase in the country, behind New York City, Houston, and Los Angeles.

“The thing you see here is, of the largest cities, San Antonio is growing at the fastest rate overall,” Martin said. “Philadelphia, of the large cities, is growing at a much slower rate.”

Going back even further, Philadelphia has added about 2,500 residents per year on average since 2000. San Antonio, by comparison, has averaged more than 15,000 new residents yearly during that time period. So Philadelphia’s lead likely won’t last forever.

“Based on the past few years, San Antonio is growing and could outpace us pretty soon in terms of population,” said Greg Diebold, a planning data analyst with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

If San Antonio does outpace us, though, it will not be the first time Philly got knocked down a peg in the population rankings. Most recently, that happened in 2020, when Phoenix overtook Philadelphia for fifth place, where it remains.

Philly, however, has been losing ground on the largest U.S. cities list since at least 1890, when Chicago bumped us to third place, taking the second-place position the city held for about a century. Later falls came in 1960, thanks to Los Angeles, and 1990, to Houston.

Between July 2023 and July 2024, cities in general seemed to show a reversal of the pandemic-era losses. The bulk of the gains, however, was concentrated in cities in the South or West, census data showed.

Four of the five fastest-growing cities, for example, were in Texas, and of the 15 cities with the largest numeric population gains, 12 were in the South or West. The South and West regions, the Census Bureau noted, experienced “accelerated growth” overall compared with the Northeast and Midwest, continuing a trend that has been ongoing for years.

The Northeast, however, showed population growth overall after several years of pandemic declines, the Census Bureau said. Northeast cities with a population of 50,000 or more, in fact, showed a growth rate of 1% on average, about five times higher than the 2023 average, according to census data. And New York City showed the largest numerical increase of any city in the country, adding about 87,000 residents, representing a 1% increase.

Philadelphia, meanwhile, has among the lowest percentage increases of the 10 largest cities, on par with Dallas and San Diego at 0.7%. San Antonio, Jacksonville, and Houston more than doubled that rate.

But as Martin noted, of the top 30 cities, all but one — Memphis — showed population increases from 2023 to 2024, representing a serious change from the pandemic years, which were largely marked by cities seeing often significant population decreases.

“Population is returning to cities overall, which is positive,” Martin said.

Because yearly census estimates are limited in their scope, it is difficult to determine whether the changes will continue, researchers noted. But as the Census Bureau said earlier this year, many metropolitan areas are seeing population increases largely due to immigration, with every metro area in the country showing positive net international immigration from 2023 to 2024.

That is true in Philadelphia as well, as the city’s population historically has been driven by gains from immigration. Between 2023 and 2024, about 21,000 immigrants moved to Philadelphia, which was more than double the number who arrived in 2022, Census Bureau estimates indicate.

But as the Pew Charitable Trusts’ “State of the City” report noted last month, the country overall is likely to see the flow of immigrants subside under President Donald Trump’s administration due to policies targeting immigration. As a result, how Philadelphia and other cities with substantial foreign-born populations will be affected remains to be seen.

“We will see if it continues to rise, and policies at the city, state, and federal level will have an impact on growth,” Martin said.