An Update to the Demographic Outlook, 2025 to 2055

The Congressional Budget Office periodically updates its demographic outlook to reflect recent developments and changes in laws and policies. The agency last published its demographic projections in January 2025. Since then, CBO has incorporated new data and reduced its estimates of net immigration over the 2025–2033 period and fertility over the 2025–2055 period.

Administrative actions taken since January 20, 2025, are the largest factor decreasing CBO's projections of the number of immigrants in the country. The 2025 reconciliation act (Public Law 119-21) also decreases that number.

CBO now projects that the U.S. population will increase from 350 million people in 2025 to 367 million people in 2055. It will be smaller and grow more slowly over the next 30 years, on average, than the agency previously projected it would. Those changes stem from lower projected net immigration through 2033 and lower fertility rates over the 2025–2055 period than the agency projected in January. In CBO's current projections, the population in 2035 is 4.5 million people smaller (or 1.2 percent) than it was projected to be in the agency's January projections. That difference grows to 5.4 million people (or 1.5 percent) in 2055. The population contains fewer people ages 25 to 54—the age group that is most likely to participate in the labor force—than the agency previously projected. Deaths are projected to exceed births in 2031, two years earlier than previously projected.

CBO's population projections are highly uncertain, especially in the later years of the 2025–2055 period. If rates of fertility, mortality, or net immigration are higher or lower than CBO projects, the resulting population will differ in size and composition from the one described here. For example, immigration could differ significantly from CBO's projections because of future legislative or administrative changes, which are not incorporated into the current projections. The effects of such differences would be larger in later years because the differences would compound over time.