State population continues to increase

Indiana’s population is continuing to grow.

By 2050, the state’s population will increase by 15 percent, from 6.48 million to 7.48 million residents, according to population projections released Tuesday by the Indiana Business Research Center at IU’s Kelley School of Business.

The population is expected to reach 6.85 million in 2020 and will continue to grow during the following decades but at increasingly lower rates.

“On our way to adding another million Hoosiers, the state’s population will continue to undergo major shifts,” IBRC state demographer Matt Kinghorn said in a press release.

“Indiana’s population in the year 2050 will have a far different age structure and geographic distribution than it does today. These changes shouldn’t catch anyone off guard. “Over the last decade or more, the aging baby boom generation has already transformed the state’s population, while a handful of metropolitan areas have captured the lion’s share of our population growth.”

The main cause of the state’s changing population is the aging of the baby boom generation.

They will be of traditional retirement age by 2030.

At that point, Indiana’s senior population will increase by nearly 600,000.

The percentage of seniors in the state will jump from 13 percent in 2010 to 20 percent in 2030.

The younger population, however, will lose market share.

The child population, those ages 0 to 14, and the young adult population, those ages 25 to 44, will increase by 75,000 by 2030. Those around college age will increase by 25,000.

“One important effect of this graying of the population will be the slowing of Indiana’s population growth rate in the coming decades,” Kinghorn said.

“Populations change through migration and through natural increase (the difference between the numbers of births and deaths). While migration plays an important role in population change, natural increase typically accounts for the majority of Indiana’s growth.”

Kinghorn said he projects deaths to rise at a faster rate than births.

“Over the next few decades, both births and deaths are projected to increase, but deaths will rise much faster due to the rapid growth of the senior population,” he said.
“As a result, the natural increase of the population will slow.”

Net out-migration is projected to continue in many counties of Indiana, although at increasingly lower rates, Kinghorn said.

“The result of these trends will be that large regions of the state will age rapidly while families concentrate more and more in a handful of metropolitan areas,” he said. “This shift was evident in the last decade when Indiana was one of only a few states in the Midwest and Northeast to see an increase in its population under the age of 18, yet all of these gains occurred in just 24 counties.”

For the complete results, go to stats.indiana.edu/topic/projections.asp.

— Claire Aronson