Migration to and from Sedgwick County

Although the rate is slowing, Sedgwick County loses many people to migration.

As part of its American Community Survey (ACS) program, the United States Census Bureau estimates migration to and from counties and other geographies. The interactive chart below shows the data for Sedgwick County from 2009 to 2019, the most recent year for this data. This chart uses the Census ACS data as presented by FRED, a service of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. ⁽¹⁾U.S. Census Bureau, Net County-to-County Migration Flow (5-year estimate) for Sedgwick County, KS [NETMIGNACS020173], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NETMIGNACS020173 A nearby table summarizes the data. (These numbers are net migration, with negative numbers meaning more people left than arrived.)

In a recent story, KMUW reported “Steven Banks, a senior planner with the Metropolitan Area Planning Department, is recommending the city and county change their comprehensive plan to adjust for more sluggish population growth. … Jeremy Hill, director of the Center for Economic Development and Business Research at Wichita State University, said that slow growth in the 2010s was due, in part, to the decline in aerospace jobs following the 2008 recession. ‘Migration has been the biggest reason why we’ve had to adjust,’ Hill said. ‘… We were still losing jobs in ’12, ’13, ’14, ’15.’” ⁽²⁾“Wichita, Sedgwick County Growing More Slowly Than Predicted”. KMUW, 2022, https://www.kmuw.org/news/2022-09-08/wichita-sedgwick-county-growing-slowly.