Demographic Change Accelerates in the U.S.

According to a recent release by the 2020 Census, demographic change has accelerated in the United States in the past 10 years. Especially the group of those aged 65 years and older has grown more quickly, the data shows.

While in the year 2010, 12.8 percent of Americans were 65 years or older, that had jumped up by 4 percentage points to 16.8 percent as of 2020. In previous decades, the relative size of the age group had remained more stable. At the same time, the share of Americans under the age of 25 took a bigger dip than usual, decreasing by 2.8 percentage points to 31.5 percent of the population. Previously, changes in the cohort size had stayed below 1 percentage point per decade.

Major changes to age groups are not unprecedented in the U.S. as numbers from the 1990 Census (compared to the 1980 Census) show. Between the two installments of the count, the last big cohorts of the Baby Boomer generation, which were born around the year 1960, aged out of the under-25 demographic, resulting in a major drop of of young people in the country by more than 5 percentage points. At the same time, the number of those 65 years or older increased. This was due to the larger pre-war age groups born before 1925 having hit their retirement age by 1990. However, the increase was smaller at 1.3 percentage points, even then showcasing the immense demographic power of the Baby Boomers that is now again being felt.

United States is only at the beginning of its journey towards demographic change. The world's most prominent aging society, Japan, already counted a 28.5 percent share of residents who were 65 or older in 2020, while Italy, Greece, Germany and Finland were looking at more than 22 percent each for this metric.