Blog Post

By Mallory Bateman and Max Backlund

Mar 2, 2022 – The Gardner Institute recently released a new vintage of long-term planning projections. The data provides official insights into the state and counties’ total populations, households, and economies. With this data, communities can plan for the next 10, 20, and 40 years and consider how changing characteristics might impact services, policies, and more.

The County Projection Profiles are the newest release, featuring insights for all 29 counties. Three of the most noteworthy trends include how and where growth will happen and what that growth means for the population make-up for each county.

1. Job Growth is More Urbanized than Population Growth. By 2060, we project that the state will add 3.3 million residents, powered by 1.3 million new jobs. By 2060, Salt Lake County will have 1.6 million residents and 1.5 million jobs. This urbanized job growth will have an oversized effect on the population growth in neighboring counties, particularly Utah, Wasatch, and Tooele.
2. Net Migration Becomes the Driver of Population Growth. These shifts also change how our population grows, moving from natural increase (births minus deaths) as the biggest driver of growth to net migration (people moving in minus people moving out) in the next 15-20 years.
3. The State’s Age Structure is Shifting. Changing characteristics of the population like lower fertility rates and higher life expectancy means the age structure of the state will change, leading to higher shares of older residents and shrinking shares of younger Utahns.

The individual summaries also address additional trends for each county. We hope these planning projections inform policy discussions across the state by improving our ability to look to the future. All of this information is available in a myriad of formats:

• from Tableau dashboards with top-level highlights or more in-depth visualizations,
• to county-specific profiles,
• to an Excel download for the folks who want to crunch their own data
• or a summary report with analysis of the data throughout the state.

Please reach out to one of our team members if you have questions – we love to share additional insights and are happy to present our findings to your group or organization.

Mallory Bateman is the director of demographic research and state data center coordinator at the Gardner Institute. 

Max Backlund is a senior research analyst at the Gardner Institute.