In a roundtable convened last month and published this week, Utah Business gathered the state's commercial real estate leaders. Executives from The Boyer Company, Overland Group, Price Real Estate, Zions Bank, CBRE, Hughes Marino, BlackPine, Altabank, and Reef Capital Partners discussed rates, construction costs, and the inland port. When the conversation turned to why Utah holds up better than its peers, Nate Boyer, president of The Boyer Company, reached for the number everyone in the room knew.
"I appreciate the fact that we still have good in-migration," he said, "and Natalie Gochnour would quote that we have 40,000 to 50,000 people still migrating into the state, creating a new city essentially every year."
It is the story Utah has told for five years. People fleeing coastal prices. Remote workers chasing mountains. A new city's worth of arrivals, every year. The story shaped how the state built, zoned, lent, and planned.
Gochnour's own shop has revised it.
Utah's population reached 3,551,150 on July 1, 2025, according to estimates released in December by the Utah Population Committee, which is chaired and staffed by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute that Gochnour directs. The state added 44,351 residents in a year, a gain that the committee compared to Bountiful's population. So far, so familiar.
But the people filling that city have changed. Net migration, the count of people moving in minus people moving out, totaled 19,233. Natural change, births minus deaths, totaled 25,118. For the first time this decade, Utahns being born outnumbered Utahns moving in.
"A significant shift occurred this year," said Emily Harris, the Gardner Institute's senior demographer and the report's lead author. She called it a return to Utah's historical growth patterns, the ones that held before the recent period of high net migration.
The figure of 40,000 to 50,000 is real. It measures total growth. As a migration number, it is more than double the current count.
How fast it turned
The pandemic years rewrote Utah's demographic ledger. The committee's December 2022 estimates recorded net migration of 38,141 that year, the highest level in state history. Later methodological revisions trimmed the peak years to roughly 35,000 a year. Either way, the committee's current tables show that Utah added nearly 58,000 people per year in 2021 and 2022, with migration accounting for about 60 percent of that growth. For the first time in the state's modern history, migration, not births, had become the engine of its growth.
The engine has throttled down every year since. Net migration fell to 26,086 in 2024, then to 19,233 in 2025. Its share of growth dropped from 57 percent in 2023 to 52 percent in 2024 to 43 percent last year. The state's growth rate slid in step, from 1.65 percent to 1.46 percent to 1.26 percent.
Births moved the other way. Utah recorded 46,869 births against 21,751 deaths in 2025, and natural change increased for the first time in over a decade, setting aside pandemic distortions. The old Utah, the one that grew on its own, is reasserting itself.
Why people stopped coming
Gochnour points to two forces. Housing and uncertainty.
"We have an expensive housing market and that's a factor in both people moving here and people staying here when they have alternatives," she told KUER in February 2025. "There's just incredible uncertainty in the economy right now, and when you're uncertain, you don't invest or you don't hire."
The housing numbers bear her out. The median sales price of a single-family home in Utah was $547,700 at the end of 2024, the ninth most expensive market in the country, according to the Gardner Institute's annual housing report. By the institute's affordability ratio, Salt Lake and Washington counties rank as severely unaffordable. The price advantage that pulled Californians east has narrowed to a discount on a market most Utahns already cannot afford.
The national picture compounds it. The Census Bureau reported in January that net international migration into the United States fell from 2.7 million to 1.3 million in a single year, a 54 percent drop the bureau called historic and the main reason national growth slowed to 0.5 percent. Utah, at 1.3 percent, still grew more than twice as fast as the country. It is just no longer outrunning its own history.
Where the growth landed
The growth that remains is uneven. Tooele and Iron counties grew fastest in 2025, at 3.0 percent each. Washington, Utah, Grand, and Wasatch counties all topped 2 percent. Utah County added the most people outright, 15,914, with births driving 60 percent of the gain.
The state's two population anchors felt the slowdown most. Utah and Salt Lake counties each added 4,000 to 5,000 fewer residents than the year before, a result the committee attributes directly to declining net migration. Five counties shrank: Daggett, Piute, Garfield, Wayne, and San Juan.
The shift lands hardest on the product built for the arrivals. "Have we overbuilt? Maybe, on the multifamily front, downtown, Salt Lake County specifically," Boyer said at the roundtable. Salt Lake County's net migration in 2025 was 1,379 people. Lora Munson of Hughes Marino put the stakes plainly: "There is no [commercial] development without a population base." Companies that can locate anywhere, she said, go where they can guarantee labor.
The long view
None of this means Utah stops growing. The Gardner Institute's long-term projections, released in November, put the state at 5.6 million people by 2065. Two million more Utahns, the approximate size of Idaho today. The institute projects the next 40 years will be characterized by record levels of net in-migration, with migration driving growth in every year except eight in the 2030s. The surge ended. The pull did not.
But it will be a different Utah. Fertility has been below replacement level since 2018. The median age is projected to climb from 32.8 to 45.3 by 2065. The youngest state in the nation is aging into something more like the rest of the country.
The numbers matter because money moves on them. Jacob Despain of Zions Bank told the roundtable that lending is steady and called it a borrower's market. Brock Bench of Altabank described outside capital arriving because "banks in general are bullish on Utah." The bullishness rests on a growth story, and the story is still true. Only the plot has changed. The new residents are not stepping off a moving truck in Herriman. They are being born, and they will not need an apartment for twenty years.
Utah is still adding a Bountiful a year. It is building the city from the inside.
