Growth Slows, but World’s Population Moves Past 8 Billion to Start 2024

A U.S. government agency says the world's population grew by about 75 million people in 2023.

The U.S. Census Bureau notes the worldwide growth rate in the past year was just under 1 percent. The agency also said there will be 4.3 births and two deaths around the world every second in 2024.

The United States' growth rate is about half that of the world overall. On January 1, 2024, the U.S. had a population of 335.8 million, the Census Bureau said.

The numbers look large. But growth rates around the world have been slowing. The United Nations notes the world population will reach 9 billion in about 15 years. That is three years longer than it took to move from 7 billion to 8 billion. The world population reached 8 billion people in November 2022.

If the current rate continues, the 2020s are likely to be the slowest growing decade in American history, the Census Bureau said.

William Frey is a population expert at the Brookings Institution, a research group based in Washington, D.C. He said the growth rate in the U.S. from 2020 to 2030 will be under 4 percent. The slowest-growing decade recorded in the U.S. took place in the 1930s, after the long economic depression. The growth rate for that decade was 7.3 percent.

Frey said the predicted growth rate could "tick up" in the next few years. But he said it is not likely to be higher than 7.3 percent.

Immigration is the reason why the U.S. will not suffer a population loss in 2024. There should be one birth every nine seconds and one death every 9.5 seconds. But there will likely be two new American immigrants every minute in 2024. As a result, every 24.2 seconds, the U.S. population will increase by one person.

The two most populous countries are India and China. India moved ahead of China at some point in 2023. The two countries both have more than 1.4 billion people. By 2050, China's population is expected to decrease by 2.7 percent.

I'm Dan Friedell.

Dan Friedell adapted this story for Learning English based on a report by the Associated Press.

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Words in This Story

depression ­–n. a long period of time when a country's economy contracts instead of grows

tick up (expression) –v. to increase by a small amount