@John When do those usually come out?
I think that they come out at different times of the year. I think that some state level data comes out soon, while details at the city and county level might come out in the Summer. Don’t quote me on that, because I’m not certain on the details.
That said, I think that we can expect the Triangle to have grown by nearly 40,000 by July 2018, with ~30,000 coming from the Raleigh MSA alone.
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It’s a complete farce that the Triangle area isn’t a single statistical area. Everyone knows the area as Raleigh-Durham. Each city would not be as large without the other. RTP, RDU - are regional entities that illustrate the point.
It is. I’ve heard handwringing about commuting patterns and RTP being mostly in Durham… none of that should matter. Any explanation I can find seems incoherent, because I can easily find examples of other multi-core metros with combined MSAs.
Wake County and Durham County have by far the most traffic between them of any two counties in the state, both by raw numbers and proportionally. If they are not in the same MSA then no two counties in the state should be.
It was considered a single MSA for decades, but redefined in the early 2000s to deliberately knee-cap federal funding for the area’s transit projects.
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I’m not sure if this has already been posted, but Wikipedia has been updated with 2019 estimates for the populations of NC cities. Raleigh is up to 485,000, while Charlotte is at 889,000 and Greensboro is at 292,000 (but rapidly losing ground to Durham, in 4th).
According to someone on a Charlotte forum, these estimates are from World Population Review.
That wiki page is very suspect because it claims 2019 Census estimates, and the Census won’t provide its 2019 estimates until sometime in 2020.
Here’s a link to that World Population Review. Frankly, it’s crap. http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/raleigh-population/
It says that Raleigh is in Durham County! The only thing that seems to be of interest is their listing annual growth numbers and rates based on Census estimates up to 2017. You can see, as of the last estimate, the absolute growth numbers are really slowing. This is (probably) mostly attributed to the city running out of “virgin” land to develop within its boundaries and the trickle of annexation in comparison to past decades. Raleigh’s 2018 Census estimate will likely be in the low 470s, with 2019 coming in the mid to high 470s. As of the 2020 Census, I’m thinking the city will land in the low 480s. At the beginning of the decade, I sort of expected the city to reach 500K by 2020, but that doesn’t look likely unless there’s been a huge mistake on the part of annual estimates.
Nonetheless, Raleigh continues to be the most densely populated major city in North Carolina.
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@John thanks for all the insight. This is all interesting to me. So when you say Raleigh is the most densely populated major city in NC , what numbers is that based on?
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Population and size of the municipal limits.
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Wake County population estimates as of July 2018:
(Methodology based on the Wake County Residential Total Units by Parcels)
Raleigh 474,833
Cary 176,114
Apex 53,553
Wake Forest 42,245
Holly Springs 36,102
Garner 31,395
Fuquay Varina 29,110
Morrisville 28,144
Knightdale 18,145
Rolesville 8,051
Wendell 7,566
Zebulon 5,504
Angier 498
Durham 310
Total City Limits 911,750
Total Wake County 1,104,910
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Amazing that Cary is closing in on Fayetteville for #6 in the state.
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@TedF
Thank you!
Amazing to already see Wake County at 1.1 million as it seems like yesterday that it had just reached the million mark. 
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I wonder if we have passed Mecklenburg now.
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I bet we are very close to passing Mecklenburg. Probably within the next 5 years for sure…
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http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/nc/
Says we’re about 4600 behind out of 1 million, as of 2019
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Those are the latest Census estimates from 2017. If you look at the most recent growth of Mecklenburg vs Wake, it looks like Wake could pass Meck by the 2020 Census. Wake has been recently growing by a few thousand people more than Meck per year. This is likely due to the sheer amount of land available to develop in Wake.
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Also there was 10 square miles of Wake County that was annexed by various cities just in 2018 alone.
Interesting. It sure looks like the county’s statisticians are a bit ahead of what the Census thinks. If we compare just the county numbers alone, there’s a 32,000 delta between the Census’ July 2017 estimate and the county’s 2018 estimate. Compare that against the county growth projections of about 23K per year per the Census, and there’s a 9,000 person gap that seems to be added to (mostly) Raleigh’s and Cary’s estimates.
Raleigh’s Census estimate was just shy of 465,000 in 2017, and Cary’s was just shy of 166,000. The county estimates put both cities 10,000 more than that in 2018, both of which are higher than what the Census is estimating the growth is per annum.
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Do you know the breakdown of those 10 square miles? I’d love to know. This year by year municipal size metric isn’t one that’s as easy to find as population estimates.
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If Raleigh is a pizza pie, Cary basically claimed two slices of it. Garner has another pizza slice but really it won’t surprise me if it eventually gets absorbed into Raleigh in 100 years.
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I wouldn’t be surprised by that either.
Not without going through 137 annexations for last year and totaling the numbers which would be more work than I want to do. But I can say that Apex and Fuquay Varina led the way by far. I sort of reversed engineered the 10 square miles based on the total area that the county lost in their Fire Insurance districts.
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