Editor’s Note: The population data in this article is preliminary. The author downloaded the U.S. Census Bureau’s full Vintage 2025 Population Estimates file (CO-EST2025-alldata), identified the 60 counties comprising the ARC Central Appalachian sub-region using the commission’s original 1965 definition, and computed all figures independently. The Census Bureau has not issued its own analysis of this sub-region. An Excel workbook containing all county-level data for all 60 counties, with separate tabs for each of the four states, is attached for editors and readers who wish to work with the underlying numbers. All figures should be treated as preliminary pending independent verification.
Last October, I reported on demographic projections from three state universities showing that the 60 coalfield counties of Central Appalachia — 30 in Kentucky, 16 in West Virginia, seven in Virginia, and seven in Tennessee — face population losses of 15-20% by 2050. Demographers at theUniversity of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, theUniversity of Kentucky, andWest Virginia University’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research painted a picture of a regional catastrophe unfolding in slow motion.
The U.S. Census Bureau has now released its Vintage 2025 population estimates, covering the five-year period from the April 2020 decennial census through July 1, 2025. The numbers are preliminary — the Census Bureau has not conducted an independent analysis of the Central Appalachian sub-region, and the figures presented here represent the author’s own computation from the raw national file — but the early trajectory is not encouraging.
In five years, the 60-county Central Appalachian coalfield region has lost approximately 49,000 people, a decline of roughly 2.9% from the 2020 census baseline. If that annual rate of loss holds, the region would reach a 15% decline by roughly 2040 — a decade ahead of the projections published last fall. For counties like McDowell in West Virginia and Breathitt in Kentucky, the pace is already running ahead of even the most pessimistic forecasts.
There is genuine good news in the data, concentrated almost entirely in Tennessee and a handful of Kentucky service-hub counties. And across Appalachia as a whole, one demographic group is growing rapidly even as the historic population declines — the region’s Hispanic community, now estimated at 5-6% of the total Appalachian population and the fastest-growing demographic in the region. But the headline across three of the four states is that the projections are becoming actuals, and in the deepest coalfield counties the pace of loss is running ahead of schedule.
The Regional Picture
The 60-county region as defined by the ARC’s original Central Appalachia designation entered 2025 with an estimated combined population of just over 1.8 million, down from its 2020 census baseline. That roughly 49,000-person reduction in five years is nearly as large as the entire population of Harlan County, Kentucky — a county that itself lost more than 2,100 people over the same period.
The losses are not evenly distributed, either geographically or by cause. Two forces are driving the decline: continued net domestic outmigration, as younger residents leave for employment elsewhere; and natural decrease, meaning deaths are now outnumbering births in nearly every county in the region. The second force is the one that demographers have flagged as the more consequential long-term threat. When young families leave, as Hamilton Lombard of the Weldon Cooper Center observed in an interview with WVTF last fall, future births are exported somewhere else. The compounding effect — fewer children born today means fewer working-age adults tomorrow, which means fewer births the generation after that — is now visible in the Census data.
In the 2025 estimate year alone, the 30 Kentucky coalfield counties recorded a combined natural decrease, with deaths exceeding births across the vast majority of the sub-region. Pike County alone saw 427 more deaths than births in that single year. Kanawha County in West Virginia, where Charleston is the county seat, recorded 751 more deaths than births. These are not coal-country statistics from the 1980s. They are from last year.
West Virginia: The Deepest Losses
West Virginia’s 16 Central Appalachian counties lost approximately 33,800 people between 2020 and 2025, a regional decline of 5.0% — double the rate of Kentucky and steeper than Virginia’s coalfields. The state’s southern coalfields are home to the worst performers in the entire 60-county region.
McDowell County, which I cited in October as the starkest example of the crisis, has fallen further still. Having dropped from 98,887 residents in 1950 to 19,123 at the 2020 census — a loss of more than 80% over seven decades — McDowell has now declined to an estimated 16,878 residents as of July 2025. That is a loss of 2,245 people, or 11.7%, in five years alone. West Virginia University’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research projected McDowell would lose roughly a third of its people by 2040. At the current pace, that threshold arrives well before then.
Mingo County has lost 9.0% of its population since 2020. Wyoming and Webster counties have each declined 7.4%. Boone and Logan counties have fallen between 6.7% and 7.2%. Kanawha County, the most populous in the state’s coalfield region at an estimated 172,381 residents in 2025, has declined 4.6% since 2020 and lost more than 1,000 residents in the single year from 2024 to 2025.
Across all 16 West Virginia Central Appalachian counties, domestic outmigration and natural decrease are both running persistently negative. Not one of the 16 counties registered population growth over the five-year period.
East Kentucky: The Deep Coal Core Versus the Emerging Exceptions
Kentucky’s 30-county coalfield sub-region declined 2.5% between 2020 and 2025, a loss of about 16,265 people. But that aggregate figure conceals a stark internal divide between the deep coal counties and a small number of counties that are growing as regional service hubs.
The deep coal core is tracking closely to the university projections from last fall. Breathitt County, which the University of Kentucky projected would lose 39% of its population by 2050, has already declined 8.5% in five years. Harlan County, projected to lose nearly 45% by 2050, is down 7.8% since 2020, with a current estimated population of 24,725. Leslie County has declined 8.4%. Letcher County is down 7.4%. Perry County and Pike County, the region’s most populous county at an estimated 54,721 residents, have each lost 6.7% of their 2020 populations. Pike County alone shed 3,946 people in five years — the largest absolute loss of any county in the entire 60-county region.
In each of these counties, the Vintage 2025 data shows natural decrease running alongside domestic outmigration, the two mechanisms reinforcing each other precisely as the University of Kentucky researchers warned they would.
Yet Eastern Kentucky also contains some of the most instructive counter-narratives in the entire region. Pulaski County, home to Somerset, grew 3.6% since 2020, adding 2,350 residents to reach an estimated 67,384. Morgan County grew 5.0%. Menifee County grew 5.2%. McCreary County gained 1.4%. These counties function increasingly as regional healthcare, retail, and service centers for the surrounding population. Their growth, modest as it is, illustrates the point the University of Virginia demographers made last fall: decline is not inevitable. But the economic forces driving growth in Somerset are not replicating themselves in Harlan or Pikeville.
Virginia: Buchanan and the Coalfield Counties
Virginia’s seven Central Appalachian coalfield counties have collectively lost 7,208 people since 2020, a decline of 4.0%. Buchanan County — which Cardinal News founding editor Dwayne Yancey has covered closely, and which the Weldon Cooper Center projects will lose 48% of its remaining population by 2050 — has fallen 9.1% since the 2020 census, from 20,343 residents to an estimated 18,492. Buchanan peaked at nearly 38,000 residents in 1980. Dickenson County has declined 6.3%. Tazewell County is down 4.5%, Wise County 3.6%.
In his February 2026 analysis of the new state-level data, Yancey reported that the Virginia coalfield counties as a group had seen the largest relative shift in domestic migration of any region in the state, moving from a net loss of more than 2,300 residents to other parts of the country in 2014 to a net gain of 377 by 2024, according to Cardinal News. Whether that modest migration reversal can be sustained — or whether it will be overwhelmed by accelerating natural decrease — is the critical open question for the Virginia sub-region. The five-year trend in the Vintage 2025 data suggests natural decrease has become the dominant force regardless of migration flows.
Tennessee: The Exception That Illuminates the Rule
The one unambiguously good news story in the Central Appalachian data belongs to Tennessee. All seven of the state’s ARC-designated coal counties gained population between 2020 and 2025. The combined gain was approximately 8,169 people, a 4.2% increase — making Tennessee the only state in the four-state region with net population growth over the period.
As I noted in October, this result is not accidental. Tennessee ceased meaningful coal production in 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and its former coal counties now benefit from their proximity to growing metropolitan centers: Knoxville, Oak Ridge, and Chattanooga. Hawkins County grew 5.0%. Hancock County grew 6.2%. Johnson County gained 4.3%. Claiborne County added 1,188 residents, a gain of 3.7%.
The contrast with McDowell County in West Virginia or Breathitt County in Kentucky is not simply a matter of geography. It reflects decades of difference in economic diversification, metropolitan connectivity, and the availability of alternatives to coal as an economic anchor. The lesson Tennessee offers to the rest of the region is also the hardest one to act on: the time to diversify was before the mines closed, not after.
A Growing Presence: The Hispanic Population
Against this backdrop of population loss, one demographic trend cuts in a different direction. Across Appalachia as a whole — a broader geography than the 60-county coalfield region — the Hispanic community has become the fastest-growing demographic, now estimated at 5-6% of the total regional population, up from a negligible presence as recently as the 1980s. The growth has been most pronounced in Southern Appalachia, driven by employment in poultry processing, construction, agriculture, and light manufacturing.
The implications for the coalfields are not yet fully visible in the Census estimates, in part because the international migration numbers for the deep coal counties remain very small. But the broader Appalachian Latino demographic shift represents one of the more significant cultural and economic transformations in the region’s modern history — and one that receives far less attention than it deserves given the pace of change. As one reader noted in response to my October article, understanding what draws Hispanic families to a region that the broader national narrative portrays as dying may offer lessons that matter for anyone trying to reverse the population loss trends the rest of the data describes.
What the Numbers Mean
The ARC was established in 1965 with a mandate to reduce Appalachia’s persistent poverty and isolation. More than six decades and billions of federal dollars later, the 60 counties of Central Appalachia are losing people at a rate that, if sustained, will eliminate roughly one in every six residents within a generation. The region that powered America’s industrial rise — that lit its cities and drove its steel mills — is being depopulated at a pace the Census Bureau’s own data now confirms.
The projections published last fall were based on demographic modeling by three state universities working from 2020 census data. What the Vintage 2025 estimates show is that the models are not overestimating the trend. In the deepest coal counties, the models may be underestimating it. Five years in, Breathitt and Harlan counties in Kentucky, McDowell County in West Virginia, and Buchanan County in Virginia are all declining at annual rates consistent with — or exceeding — the worst-case scenarios in the projections.
John Whisman, the Appalachian Regional Commission’s first States Co-Chair, once said that the only way to address Appalachian poverty was to “bribe the governors” — to make federal support so compelling that state governments would have no choice but to invest in the region. It was an admission that the region could not solve its problems alone. Six decades later, the investment has not arrived at any scale commensurate with the crisis the data now describes, and the people are leaving anyway.
The question the new Census data forces is simple: at what population level does a county cease to be functionally viable? McDowell County, West Virginia, at 16,878 people — down from nearly 100,000 in 1950 — may already be approaching that threshold for some services. If the projections hold, it will not be the last county in the region to face that question.
James Branscome is a journalist and author who has covered Appalachia for five decades. He writes for the Kentucky Lantern, Cardinal News, West Virginia Watch, and the Daily Yonder, and publishes the Appalachian Daily News newsletter. He can be reached through his Substack at substack.com/@jbranx.
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