ISSUE 003
The state projected these counties would empty out. Some are growing.
Missouri publishes long-range population projections, and for the part of the state I live in they read like a slow evacuation notice. Then I went and pulled what actually happened. The two do not entirely match, and the mismatch is the most encouraging thing I've found doing this.
An idea worth thinking about
A forecast is also a set of instructions
The Office of Administration publishes long-range population projections for Missouri, and the picture they paint is stark. Every one of the ten fastest-growing counties is projected to be metropolitan. With the single exception of St. Louis County, all ten counties of greatest projected decline are rural. New Madrid County is projected to lose more than a third of its population by 2030; Iron and Gentry counties around 30 percent. The suburban ring does the opposite — Christian and Lincoln counties more than doubling, St. Charles up 76 percent.
Projections like these aren't neutral descriptions. They get read by people deciding where to site a clinic, where to run fibre, which school district to consolidate, which county is worth a grant officer's attention. A forecast of decline, taken seriously by enough institutions, helps produce the decline it forecast.
Which is why the vintage matters. These projections were built on migration patterns that predate widespread remote work, and the methodology carries constraints baked in from the start. The actual county numbers since 2020, in the next two slots, do not tell the same story. I'm not claiming the projections are wrong so much as that they are a model of a Missouri that stopped existing somewhere around 2020, and they are still sitting on a state website being used.
Read the state projections
A tool I disappeared into
Any Missouri county, broken into the three reasons it grew or shrank
USAFacts, a nonprofit that republishes federal data without an argument attached, has a page for every county in the country that decomposes population change into its three actual components: natural change (births minus deaths), international migration, and domestic migration between counties. Refreshed annually, and county-level data currently runs through 2025.
The decomposition is what makes it worth your time, because "the county is shrinking" usually turns out to mean three different things happening at once in different directions. St. Louis County is the clean example: between 2024 and 2025 it lost 755 people overall, but underneath that, deaths exceeded births by about 1,300, roughly 3,900 more people arrived from other countries than left, and about 3,400 more moved out to other US counties than moved in. One small net number, three large opposing forces.
Run your own county through it before you accept any general statement about rural Missouri, including mine. The statewide picture is an average of 115 county equivalents that are not doing the same thing.
Look up your county
Learn something
The Census Bureau's own account of how the pandemic reshuffled rural counties
The Census Bureau writes up its own estimates releases in plain language, and the one on shifting domestic migration is the clearest short explanation I've found of what changed after 2020. Some longstanding trends accelerated, like outmigration from large urban areas in the Northeast. Others reversed outright — some small rural counties began gaining population where they had been losing it.
The detail worth carrying around is that the effect was size-dependent and region-dependent rather than uniform. In the Middle Atlantic, counties under 70,000 people saw gains from net domestic migration. In the Pacific division, the very smallest counties gained notably while most of the largest lost substantially. "Rural counties are growing now" is too coarse to be useful; which rural counties, of what size, near what, is the actual question.
One methodological note the Bureau makes that trips people up: their net domestic migration component includes changes in the group quarters population — prisons, dormitories, nursing homes. In a small county, a single facility opening or closing can move the migration number without a single family relocating.
Read the Census analysis
What we’re seeing
Missouri had more deaths than births. It grew anyway, entirely because people moved here.
MU Extension's Missouri Economy Indicators series reports that from 2020 to 2025 the state's population rose by 115,000, or 1.9 percent, while experiencing a natural decrease — more deaths than births. Every bit of the growth came from migration. An earlier brief in the same series, covering 2020 to 2024, put the natural decrease at around 11,000 people against an increase of more than 90,000 driven by people moving in.
Where from is worth knowing precisely. Over that period more than half of the people relocating to Missouri came from outside the United States, and Missouri ranked 28th nationally for international immigration and 17th for domestic migration. Among domestic movers, Illinois was the largest single source — the state losing population fastest among Missouri's neighbours. These are demographic facts and I'm reporting them as such.
The metro-versus-rural split is closer than the projections would suggest. The 2020 to 2025 brief has metropolitan counties growing 2.0 percent against nonmetropolitan at 1.6 percent. The 2020 to 2024 brief reports 1.6 and 1.1 percent for the same categories over its shorter window. Both are from the same organisation; the windows differ, so the numbers differ, and it's worth noticing that rather than quoting whichever pair suits the argument.
Either way the gap is around four tenths of a percentage point, not a chasm — and individual rural counties beat the state handily. Scotland County led Missouri in percentage growth between 2024 and 2025 at 2.6 percent. Webster and Hickory, both near the Springfield metro, posted strong gains. None of those are counties the long-range projections had any enthusiasm for.
The conclusion I'd actually stand behind: an aging state that grows only through in-migration has a workforce problem it cannot birth its way out of, and that makes every county's ability to attract and keep working-age people the whole ballgame. That is a far more actionable framing than decline, and it is what the numbers support.
MU Extension, Missouri Economy Indicators, April 2026
One question
Did you move to your county, or have you always been there?
Moved or stayed — and if you moved, roughly when and from where. The state data can tell me the totals but not one useful thing about why.
More in this pillar as it's written.
— Shana
Sources link to the original publisher, never to a summary.