Fewer people are moving to Texas cities amid the country’s broader immigration slowdown, but the state remains home to some of the fastest growing cities in the country, new U.S. Census Bureau data show.
Celina, a city about an hour north from downtown Dallas, was the fastest growing city in the country last year, according to census data released Thursday. The city grew by 24.6%, adding more than 12,710 residents between July 2024 and July 2025.
Eight of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are in Texas — primarily suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, the state’s largest urban area. Meanwhile, some of the state’s biggest cities like Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth are still adding tens of thousands of residents — despite a slowdown in international migration to the United States and lower birth rates.
Other places in Texas are struggling, including some of its biggest cities. Out of the state’s 15 largest cities, six lost residents: Dallas, El Paso, Arlington, Plano, Irving and Garland.
Texas remains a high-growth state, and the economy is still growing. But the Trump administration’s immigration slowdown has played a significant role in slowing that growth. As a border community, El Paso’s population decline likely stems from that slowdown, said Lloyd Potter, the state demographer. International migration to El Paso County slowed significantly in 2025 as thousands of residents moved out.
Other factors are weighing on the state’s population growth. Fewer Texans are being born as the number of deaths is rising, Potter said. It’s likely that economic uncertainty has made people less eager to move, he said. When they do, they move to places seen as more affordable and with better job opportunities than where they currently live, Potter said.
“Texas is still growing more than any other state,” Potter said. “I don’t really think that we’re going to all of a sudden make a turnaround and Texas is going to start losing population or [that growth] is going to slow really dramatically.”
Celina is among a set of Dallas’ outer-ring suburbs that have boomed since the start of the decade, more than doubling their population over the past five years. Celina has almost quadrupled in size since 2020, adding more than 46,000 residents. Among U.S. cities with more than 20,000 residents, Celina ranked fourth-highest in terms of raw numerical growth.
Celina Mayor Ryan Tubbs, 36, and his wife moved to Celina from Allen in 2017, seeking a quieter, family-oriented neighborhood with good schools and a slower pace, Tubbs told The Texas Tribune. Since then, it’s drawn young families in search of the same thing, as well as a perception of strong public safety and proximity to major suburban job centers in Frisco and McKinney. The typical home value in Celina is north of $500,000, according to the latest Zillow data, but that’s cheaper than Frisco and McKinney, Tubbs noted.
“It attracts a lot of like-minded young families that want to be in new communities,” Tubbs said.
Tubbs wants Celina to be more than a bedroom community, though: he said Celina aims to enter the highly competitive arms race among Dallas suburbs for major employers.
Celina’s not alone. Among the 15 fastest growing cities last year, six were in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs: Celina, Princeton, Melissa, Anna, Forney and Greenville.
Fulshear and Hutto — about 45 minutes from downtown Houston and Austin, respectively — also were among the country’s fastest growing cities.
While Dallas’ farflung suburbs are booming, the region’s core cities aren’t faring as well. Dallas remains the country’s ninth largest city and the state’s third largest. But the city lost more than 1,800 residents in 2025 after mostly gaining them this decade. Four other big cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth region — Irving, Garland, Carrollton and Arlington — lost more than 1,000 residents.
The fast-growing suburbs tend to have relatively more affordable housing options than the core cities and greater proximity to newer schools, parks and trails and modern commercial areas, said Cullum Clark, director of the George W. Bush Institute’s Economic Growth Initiative at Southern Methodist University. A perception of better public safety in the suburbs also makes them attractive, he said. Meanwhile, more established places like Dallas, Arlington, Plano and Irving aren’t adding homes or redeveloping as quickly — if at all.
“The newness is the attraction,” Clark said.
It’s not all doom and gloom in the urban core. Fort Worth, which surpassed 1 million residents in 2024, became the nation’s 10th largest city in 2025, surpassing Jacksonville, Fla. Cowtown also saw the greatest numeric population increase in the state — 19,512. It was second overall in the nation, behind Charlotte, N.C., which added 20,731 people.
San Antonio added the third-highest numerical growth in the country with 14,359 new residents.
Houston and Fulshear each added about 11,000 residents while McKinney added about 8,500.
Meanwhile, Austin passed 1 million residents — surpassing San Jose, Calif.
Some 65 cities added at least 1,000 residents between 2024 and 2025, most of them in the Texas Triangle — a term used to describe the area that includes the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin regions.
Disclosure: George W. Bush Institute and Southern Methodist University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
