You see it on the streets and highways, in classrooms and grocery checkout lines and in the prices for real estate and apartments. There are more and more of us living here every year.

North Carolina added 139,526 people to its population in the year ending last July 1, more than all other states except Texas and Florida, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The state’s rate of growth — 1.3% — was the fifth fastest during that time. The other Carolina to the south led all states in the pace of growth last year, at 1.7%.

Migration of people from other states and other countries accounted for about 91% of North Carolina’s growth last year, according to the Census Bureau. The state saw a net influx of more than 97,000 people from other states, and nearly 29,500 from other countries.

Natural population growth (births over deaths) accounted for the remaining 9% of the increase. That was up from 5% of overall growth the year before, notes Nathan Dollar, director of Carolina Demography at UNC Chapel Hill, as the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on mortality wanes.

“The number of births in NC decreased by about 1,000 compared to last year, while the number of deaths decreased by 7,229,” Dollar wrote in an email. “This large decrease in the number of deaths is most likely due to a reduction in deaths from COVID-19.”

North Carolina had an estimated 10,835,491 residents last July 1, according to the Census Bureau. It remains the country’s ninth most populous state but is slowly gaining on Georgia, which topped 11 million residents.

While most new residents are settling in the Triangle and Charlotte areas or coastal counties such as Brunswick, the state’s population growth is becoming more widespread. In the year ending July 1, 2022, 78 of the state’s 100 counties added population, according to the State Demographer in the Office of State Budget and Management. That’s a change from the decade ending in 2020 when about half the state’s counties lost population.

U.S. population growth slowly recovers from pandemic

Overall, the country’s population growth appears to be recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. grew by more than 1.6 million people in the past year, to about 335 million. That 0.5% increase is still historically low; for most of the 20th century, the country’s population grew somewhere between 1% and 2% a year.

But it’s up from less than 0.2% in 2021, the lowest on record. Immigration from other countries was up about 14%, to more than 1.1 million during the year, while 307,000 fewer people died.

“U.S. migration returning to pre-pandemic levels and a drop in deaths are driving the nation’s growth,” Kristie Wilder, a demographer at the Census Bureau, said in a written statement. “Although births declined, this was tempered by the near 9% decrease in deaths. Ultimately, fewer deaths paired with rebounding immigration resulted in the nation experiencing its largest population gain since 2018.”

Fewer states lost population than during the year before. Eleven states that lost population in 2022 are growing again, according to the Census Bureau, and only eight declined last year, either because of residents moving to other states, because deaths outnumbered births or both. They include New York, California, Illinois, Louisiana, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The South, a region the Census Bureau defines as stretching from Texas to Virginia, accounted for 87% of the country’s growth in the year ending July 1. The South is the only part of the country that grew throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as it continued to attract residents from other parts of the country and abroad. Last year, migration, both domestic and international, accounted for about 86% of the region’s population growth.