Sioux Falls: Population exceeds 200,000

Sioux Falls has crossed a population milestone to exceed 200,000 people, city officials announced today.

The city’s population is estimated at 202,600, an addition of 6,750 people in the past year, giving the city a growth rate of 3.45 percent.

“This is really interesting. Two hundred thousand is really interesting when you put it in context. It’s big,” said Jeff Schmitt, the city’s planning projects coordinator, who has tracked population growth for decades.

“We always knew it was going to be around this time frame, but it’s definitely earlier than expected.”

To arrive at the estimate, the city looks at various data points, including how many new housing units — homes and apartments — were built in the past year and how occupied they are.

In 2020, the city’s population grew by 5,100 residents, or 2.7 percent.

“We did 5,700 housing units over the last two years,” Schmitt said. “We have all these housing units, and they’re getting occupied.”

Historically, Sioux Falls has averaged a 4,280-person annual increase for more than a decade, or 2.4 percent each year. Schmitt typically applies a 2 percent annual growth rate to projections, which are used to plan capital improvement and utility projects, but is looking at adjusting it.

Current, the city is estimating the population will reach 279,000 people by 2040 at 2 percent annual growth.

Major milestone

Surpassing 200,000 also catapults Sioux Falls past several major cities, Schmitt added.

“We just passed a lot of state capitals,” he said, noting the city’s population now is greater than Salt Lake City, Utah; Tallahassee, Florida; Montgomery, Alabama; and Little Rock, Arkansas.

Data from United Van Lines, which released a study last week ranking South Dakota second for in-migration at 69 percent, found that the Sioux Falls metro area is adding people at a greater rate than the state as a whole.

Sioux Falls ranked sixth nationally, with 78 percent inbound migration versus 22 percent outbound. The top states people are moving from to Sioux Falls were North Carolina, California, Minnesota, Illinois and Colorado.

More U.S. Census data from the 2020 census still needs to be released, but initial figures — which show the Sioux Falls population at 192,000 as of April 2020 — also point to an increasingly diverse community. Here’s a look at how ethnicity has changed in the last 10 and 20 years:

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