California’s population fell again amid second year of the pandemic

The nation’s most populous state is shrinking.

California’s population declined again in 2021 for the second consecutive year, state officials said Monday, the result of a slowdown in births and immigration coupled with an increase in deaths and people leaving the state.

With an estimated 39,185,605 residents, California is still the most populous state in the U.S. But after years of strong growth brought California tantalizingly close to the 40 million milestone, the state’s population is now roughly back to where it was in 2016 after declining by 117,552 people this year.

California’s population growth had slowed prior to the pandemic as baby boomers’ aged, younger generations were having fewer children and more people were moving to other states. But the state’s natural growth — more births than deaths — and its robust international immigration had been more than enough to offset those losses.

That changed in 2020, when the pandemic killed tens of thousands of people above what would be expected from natural causes, a category demographers refer to as “excess deaths.”

California’s population fell for the first time that year, the first decline ever recorded. At the time, state officials thought it was a outlier, the result of a pandemic that turned the world upside down. But the new estimates released Monday by the California Department of Finance showed the trend continued in 2021, although the decline was less than in 2020.