How California's Population Has Changed Since 1990

California is still the most populous state in the country by a wide margin, home to 39.3 million people and roughly 11.7% of the entire US population. But the demographic story of the past 35 years is not one of unchecked growth. It is a story of a state that grew explosively through the 1990s, hit a plateau in the 2000s, absorbed an enormous tech-driven wealth surge in the 2010s, lost population for the first time on record during the pandemic, and is now growing again at a pace that is barely distinguishable from zero. The Census data captures every stage of that arc, and the details matter.

The 1990s: the last great growth decade

California in 1990 had 29,760,021 residents, a median household income of $35,798, and a median home value of $194,300. The state was coming off the 1980s boom and heading into a recession that hit California harder than most of the country, with the post-Cold War defense and aerospace downsizing eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs concentrated in Southern California. According to the California Legislative Analyst's Office, the domestic outmigration California experienced during the early 1990s defense contraction was as large as the pandemic-era exodus that made national headlines thirty years later.

Despite that early-decade pain, California recovered strongly and added 4.1 million residents through the decade, reaching 33,871,648 by 2000. Income grew to $47,493, a 33% nominal increase, and home values crossed six figures at $198,900. The tech boom of the late 1990s concentrated enormous wealth in the Bay Area and created the conditions for the housing affordability crisis that would define the state's next two decades, but in 2000 those consequences were not yet fully visible in the statewide numbers.

The 2000s: slower growth and the housing bubble

The 2010 snapshot shows a state of 37,253,956 people - an addition of 3.4 million through the decade, slower than the 1990s and increasingly concentrated in the inland regions as coastal prices pushed working-class and middle-class households eastward. Median household income reached $60,883 and median home value hit $458,500, the latter figure reflecting both genuine appreciation and the distortion of the 2004-2007 housing bubble, which inflated California home prices to levels that proved unsustainable and contributed to the state's severe exposure to the 2008 financial crisis.

The Inland Empire was the growth story of this decade. The Riverside-San Bernardino metro grew from 3.25 million in 2000 to roughly 4.1 million by 2010, absorbing the households priced out of Los Angeles and San Diego who were willing to trade a two-hour commute for homeownership. Bakersfield grew from 247,057 to over 340,000. Fresno added 80,000 residents. The Central Valley and Inland Empire were doing what the Sun Belt was doing nationally - absorbing cost-sensitive households - inside California itself.

The 2010s: tech wealth and the affordability breaking point

The decade from 2010 to 2020 is when California's internal contradictions became impossible to ignore. The state grew from 37.25 million to 39.54 million, adding 2.3 million people - the slowest decade of growth since the 1950s despite an economic expansion centered in California that produced more new billionaires than any comparable period in state history.

San Francisco added 68,730 residents between 2010 and 2020, growing from 805,235 to 873,965. Median household income in the city reached $119,136 by 2020, up from $71,304 in 2010, a 67% increase in a single decade. Median home value went from $785,200 to $1,152,300. The tech industry's concentration of wealth in the Bay Area produced the most expensive housing market in American history outside of Manhattan, and the spillover effects drove middle-income households out of the region and increasingly out of the state.

San Jose followed the same trajectory, growing from 945,942 to 1,013,240 residents with median household income rising from $79,405 to $117,324. Los Angeles grew from 3.79 million to 3.9 million, with income rising from $49,138 to $65,290 and home values from $553,900 to $670,700. But the poverty rate in LA was still 16.9% in 2020, one of the highest of any major city in the country, a reminder that the state's wealth surge was distributed extraordinarily unevenly.

The pandemic break: California loses population for the first time

The 2020 decennial Census recorded California's population at 39,538,223. By 2022 it had fallen to approximately 39,029,342, according to Census Bureau estimates - a loss of roughly 509,000 people in two years. California became the first state in its modern history to lose a congressional seat after the 2020 Census, a consequence of its slower growth relative to Sun Belt states rather than outright decline, but the directional shift was real.

The outmigration numbers tell the story precisely. According to the California Legislative Analyst's Office, annual net outmigration to other states nearly doubled from about 170,000 people in 2019 to around 300,000 during the first three years of the pandemic, as remote work made it possible for high earners to maintain California-level salaries while paying Nevada, Texas, or Arizona housing costs. According to Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research, California lost a net of 407,000 residents to other states between July 2021 and July 2022 alone, and two-thirds of those who moved said politics was not a factor - it was cost.

The destination states were exactly what you would expect. Texas, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, and Washington were the top recipients of California outmigration. The income carried by departing households was substantial: according to IRS migration data reported by the LAO, the pandemic-era outmigration was a drag on California personal income tax revenue of roughly 1% per year - not catastrophic, but meaningful for a state that was already running structural deficits.

Where the growth stayed and where it didn't

The geography of California's growth and decline since 1990 is not uniform. The coastal metros - San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego - drove income and home value appreciation but generated relatively little net population growth as their affordability collapsed. The inland regions - the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, and the Sacramento area - absorbed much of the state's actual population growth, housing the workers who couldn't afford coastal rents.

Sacramento grew from 369,365 in 1990 to 528,706 today, a 43% increase. Fresno grew from 354,202 to 545,970, a 54% increase. Bakersfield grew from 247,057 to 411,986, a 67% increase. These cities have poverty rates of 14-20%, significantly above the national average, reflecting the concentration of lower-income households in the regions that remained affordable even as coastal California became inaccessible to anyone without significant assets or tech-sector income.

San Francisco peaked at 873,965 in 2020 and has since fallen to 830,235, a loss of 43,730 residents in four years. That decline is visible in the vacancy rates on downtown commercial blocks, the closure of retail anchors, and the sustained political debate about public safety and homelessness that has dominated city politics since 2020. The CensusEasy data shows that San Francisco's median home value has risen from $1,152,300 in 2020 to $1,394,500 today despite the population loss, which reflects the wealth concentration dynamic: fewer people, but the ones who stayed are wealthier on average than the ones who left.

California today: 39.3 million and barely growing

The current California state page shows a population of 39,287,377 - slightly below the 2020 peak - with a median household income of $99,122, a median home value of $734,700, and a poverty rate of 12.0%. According to the California Department of Finance, the state grew by about 19,200 people in the year ending July 2025, a 0.05% increase that rounds to zero on most measures. The recovery from pandemic-era decline is real but extremely modest, driven primarily by a rebound in international immigration rather than a reversal of domestic outmigration, which according to the most recent LAO analysis increased again to a net loss of 216,000 in 2024-2025.

The 35-year arc of California's population data tells the story of a state that was the dominant destination for American ambition through most of the twentieth century and has spent the past two decades becoming a state that exports its own residents to the places it once competed against. The Census numbers measure that shift without judgment: 29.76 million in 1990, 39.29 million today, with every decade of that journey visible in the data.

You can explore the full California time series and compare any city or metro to the statewide trend using the Compare tool.