A video called "Everyone is leaving New York.." has 859,000 views and counting, part of a season of exodus content that took off when Zohran Mamdani won City Hall [1]. The newest official population numbers came out in January. They show the opposite of an exodus, and the details are more interesting than either story.
We pulled the Census Bureau's raw Vintage 2025 dataset - the actual CSV, not a write-up of it - and did the arithmetic ourselves [2]. New York State bottomed out in 2022 at 19.71 million. It grew in 2023. It grew again in 2024. It grew again, barely, in 2025, and now sits at 20,002,427 - back above twenty million, three annual gains in a row [2].
Data
| 2021 | 19.84 millions |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 19.71 millions |
| 2023 | 19.79 millions |
| 2024 | 20 millions |
| 2025 | 20 millions |
The claim has a real kernel, and it deserves stating plainly. New York still runs the second-largest domestic outflow in the country - a net 137,586 residents moved to other states in the year ending July 2025 [2] - and the tax data show a net loss of about $9.9 billion in adjusted gross income to other states in 2022-23 [6]. People leaving New York is a real, ongoing, expensive fact.
It is also a shrinking one. That 137,586 is about 58 percent below the pandemic-era peak, when a net 326,190 left in a single year [2]. The state's own tax department counts the outflow of tax filers falling from roughly 110,000 to 76,000 in the latest data and calls it "noticeably less than in the prior periods" [5].
Why did statewide growth flatline in 2025? Not because leaving accelerated. Because arriving collapsed: net international migration into New York fell from 290,637 to 95,634 in one year, the local edition of the national immigration crackdown [2][3]. If the video wanted a real story about New York's population, that is the one - the state's growth engine is being throttled by federal policy, not by people fleeing a mayor.
About that mayor: the estimates end on July 1, 2025. Mamdani took office in January 2026. There is no federal population data - none - covering a single day of his term yet [2][3]. Every "exodus under Mamdani" claim is a prediction wearing a statistic's clothes.
One more thing about the video itself. We pulled its caption track. The spoken audio never says "everyone," and never says "leaving" [1]. The claim that drew 859,000 pairs of eyes exists only in the title - the packaging asserts what the tape never quite commits to. The census counted anyway.
