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SALT LAKE CITY — When people think of Utah, they may picture its scenic snow-capped mountains or its red-rock canyons, but demographers like Mallory Bateman envision children and large families.
Utah is nationally known as being the youngest state in the county, a title it retained through new population estimation data released last week; however, it's quickly growing up along with the rest of the country.
A report issued by the Census Bureau earlier this year notes that the number of Americans aged 65 and older skyrocketed between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, while the percentage of children shrank. This trend played out in Utah, which was the fast-growing state in percentage growth over the decade.
"We're still a young population, but we're starting to see different things in our population," says Bateman, director of demographic research for the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
She and other experts gathered together at the institute's headquarters Tuesday for a roundtable discussion about this trend and the impacts it may have should it continue in the future.
What's causing the US and Utah to age?
The Census Bureau issued a report in May that highlighted how the United States aged between 2010 and 2020, as the number of Americans aged 65 or older surged from about 40.3 million to 55.8 million in the matter of a decade. The country's median age rose from 37.2 to 38.8 in that time, as the percentage of children declined.
"The population, as a whole, grew by about 7% between 2010 and 2020, but the number of people ages 65 and older rose by almost 40% over that decade, so a really big shift," said Beth Jarosz, program director of the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau. "The population under age 5 shrank by about 9% nationally."
This comes with a bit of a caveat. Jarosz points out that renters, young children and several minority communities were undercounted in the 2020 census, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, while adults 50 and older, Asian and white populations and homeowners were overcounted.
That said, many of these trends, including the undercount of children, also happened during the 2010 census.
"The undercount grew a little bit, but not by 9%," she said. "So, we know for sure that the population under age 5 shrank between 2010 and 2020. That's also been confirmed by things like birth records. ... We're really certain that group is smaller than it was a decade before."
Utah's demographic changes aren't much different, which helps shed light on what's happening across many other states. The Beehive State wound up with the same 9% decrease in population of children under 5 between 2010 and 2020; however, its population of residents 65 and older rose by 53% over the course of the decade.
So what's behind these statistics?
The growth in older populations has more to do with Utahns — and Americans as a whole — living longer, especially now as the baby boom generation of children born between 1946 and 1964 reaches the 65 and older bracket.
Heidi Prior, a public policy analyst for the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, points out that baby boomers began reaching the 65-and-older age bracket in 2011. In 2020, Utah's population bracket of residents between 65 and 74 — the first half of the generation — grew by 67%, faster than any other age group in the state.
"The 65-and-older population grew in every county in Utah, but more in some counties than others," Prior said. "Summit County and Wasatch County saw their populations double over the decade, which is just incredible."
This growth has been so significant that it's causing the percentage of Utahns under 18 to shrink, even though there were more than 75,000 more children in the state in 2020 than in 2010.
With declining birth rates beginning around 2008, often tied to the start of the Great Recession and a higher cost of living in the past decade, Utah's under-18 population growth only ended up as about half of the state's overall growth. Utah's fertility rate is still high nationally; however, its rate of 63.6 births per 1,000 women was bested by South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska in 2021.
The end result of these trends is that the percentage of children in Utah dropped from 32% in 2010 to 29% in 2020. It's still sliding, as the Census Bureau estimates it fell to about 27.6% in 2022. The median age is also going up, climbing from 29.2 in 2010 to an estimated 31.9 in 2022.
The impact of an aging population
Jarosz said the changes in age are creating "minor shifts" in American household data, where the number of people who live alone rose while the number of large households tumbled a bit. It's a trend that she said is forecast to "accelerate" over the next few decades.
"Americans are increasingly living alone — the share of one-person households increased pretty substantially over the decade, and childless households are much more common," she said, noting that households with kids slipped from about one-third in 2010 to nearly one-quarter in 2020.
You have the advantage of time. Watch what other aging states are doing and don't make the same mistakes that they've made.
–Beth Jarosz, Population Reference Bureau
Utah's numbers are different but not completely far off the national average. About one-fifth of the state lived alone in 2020, and the number of seven-or-more people in one household is slipping.
Experts add the data has possible ramifications for the type of housing that's constructed in the future, as well as impacts to the state's workforce, health care resources, mobility infrastructure and for school districts that may see enrollment decline after decades of growth.
But what complicates these trends is that the story isn't playing out exactly the same in every town and city. Bateman said some of the state's fastest-growing municipalities are still experiencing "really intense growth" among children ages 0 to 5.
That means local, county and state officials will have to consider "a lot of different experiences" when it comes to projects and spending, should these trends persist. And the Gardner Policy Institute's current population models do project these trends to persist for at least the foreseeable future.
Yet with its young median age, Jarosz says Utah leaders still have plenty of time to review what other states with older populations do as they deal with the same type of trends and craft policies based on what works.
"You have the advantage of time. Watch what other aging states are doing and don't make the same mistakes that they've made," she said. "While you've got this really robust economy and young labor force, figure out how to put that infrastructure in place now so that the people can age in place."
