(The Center Square) – Experts say the Colorado economy could take a hit as the state’s population growth continues on a decade-long decline.
Colorado has been on the trend toward slower population growth as fewer people look to move to the state. This past year was the state’s lowest year for net migration over the past decade, outside of the pandemic in 2021.
“Our economy relies on a growing population in order to sustain the kind of boom that happened over the last 10 or 15 years,” DJ Summers, spokesperson for the business policy group Common Sense Institute Colorado, told The Center Square. CSI recently released a report authored by experts Jimenez Sanchez and Cole Anderson.
Colorado has well outpaced the national average for population growth in recent years. The U.S. yearly growth rate was 0.6% from 2010-2020, while Colorado soared at 1.4% according to the Pew Research Center.
Over that same period, Colorado’s economy has expanded by 54% (5.4% per year), according to gross domestic product data from Macrotrends. While the state’s wider economy has continued to quickly grow through 2025, CSI argued residents were already feeling the pain of the slowed population growth.
“Colorado, according to our rankings, is the ninth-least affordable state in the nation. We’ve got to spend almost $20,000 more per household relative to 2019 for exactly the same services and products,” said Summers.
The same CSI study found the average U.S. household spent $15,400 more in 2025 than 2019 for basic needs.
“We know that’s driven largely by a housing market that is one of the nation’s least affordable,” Summers told The Center Square.
According to Visual Capitalist, Colorado ranked 38th among the 50 states and Washington, D.C., for housing affordability based on median income and for-sale listings.
“We are at the bottom of the national charts for our competitiveness in the housing market,” said Summers. “We have been there for the better part of a decade, and that is a troubling trend.”
Summers and the CSI also argued that overregulation by the state government has made a more difficult and costly environment for businesses in Colorado.
“The average number of bills passed in the legislative session in this decade is about 56% higher than the average of the 2010s,” said Summers. “So we know that the regulatory environment is getting a lot more active, and businesses have trouble adjusting to that. They need more predictability, and they need a friendlier environment in order to flourish.”
He linked the increased regulations in Colorado to the state’s high rate of lost businesses and jobs.
A recent report by the CSI found the state ranked 48th for net business closings in 2024, relative to the state’s population. That amounted to nearly 4,000 more Colorado businesses closed than opened in 2024, and more than 13,000 jobs lost.
The post-pandemic lower rates of migration to Colorado fell to their lowest point this past year as 13,568 more people moved into the state than out of it, the second-lowest of the past decade after 2021’s peak-pandemic state, according to CSI.
“Now that we’re seeing domestic migration slow down, that points to economic realities that need to be understood here in Colorado,” said Summers. “Namely, that the kind of population we relied on to drive our economic growth in the mid-2010s simply can’t be taken for granted anymore.”
