Celina, Texas grew 24.6% in a single year — the fastest of any U.S. city with more than 20,000 residents, according to the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 population estimates. Yet U-Haul’s separate Growth Index names a completely different city its top spot: Ocala, Florida, which has held the #1 growth-city ranking for the third time in four years. Both are measuring real 2025 data. They’re just measuring different things.
Quick answer: By percentage population growth, the Census Bureau’s top five fastest-growing cities (20,000+ residents) are all in Texas: Celina (24.6%), Fulshear (21.0%), Princeton (18.1%), Melissa (14.5%), and Anna (10.2%). By net one-way truck-rental volume, U-Haul’s top growth city is Ocala, Florida, with Florida claiming 8 of the top 10 spots on that separate list.
Why “Fastest-Growing City” Depends on What You’re Measuring
The Census Bureau’s ranking measures percentage growth in a city’s own population between 2024 and 2025 — a method that naturally favors smaller cities, where a few thousand new residents can move the percentage dramatically. U-Haul’s Growth Index instead measures net one-way truck and trailer rental volume, which favors cities and metros absorbing the largest raw number of self-move households, regardless of how big they already are. Neither approach is wrong; they simply answer different questions about growth.
The Census Bureau’s Official Top 15 (Vintage 2025 Estimates)
Here is the complete top 15, released by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2026 covering the 2024–2025 period, limited to cities and towns with populations of 20,000 or more:
| Rank | City | State | Growth % | 2025 Population |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Celina | Texas | 24.6% | 64,427 |
| 2 | Fulshear | Texas | 21.0% | 64,630 |
| 3 | Princeton | Texas | 18.1% | 43,524 |
| 4 | Melissa | Texas | 14.5% | 29,969 |
| 5 | Anna | Texas | 10.2% | 35,245 |
| 6 | Haines City | Florida | 10.0% | 45,973 |
| 7 | Waukee | Iowa | 9.3% | 34,890 |
| 8 | Forney | Texas | 8.5% | 41,658 |
| 9 | Eagle Mountain | Utah | 8.5% | 66,557 |
| 10 | Johnstown | Colorado | 8.4% | 22,433 |
| 11 | Kuna | Idaho | 8.4% | 31,525 |
| 12 | Queen Creek | Arizona | 8.2% | 89,770 |
| 13 | Hutto | Texas | 7.9% | 46,048 |
| 14 | Foley | Alabama | 7.8% | 30,354 |
| 15 | Greenville | Texas | 7.5% | 37,069 |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 city and town population estimates, 2024–2025 growth rate, cities with population 20,000 or more.
Why Texas Suburbs Dominate the Percentage Rankings
The Census Bureau’s own release is blunt about the pattern: “the top five fastest-growing cities in the nation with populations of 20,000 or more were all in Texas,” with four of them — Celina, Princeton, Melissa, and Anna — clustered in the suburbs north of Dallas-Fort Worth, and the fifth, Fulshear, sitting just outside Houston. Six of the full top 15 are Texas cities, all exurbs riding new-home construction on the outer edge of the state’s two largest metros.
This isn’t unique to this year’s data — it reflects a broader national shift the Census Bureau has also documented separately: population gains in major metro areas are increasingly concentrated in the exurbs, on the outer edge of the metro, rather than in the core cities themselves.
What’s Actually Driving Celina and Fulshear’s Growth
Celina, roughly an hour north of Dallas, isn’t growing by accident. Fortune’s reporting on the Census data frames it plainly: what Celina and its Collin County neighbors have that legacy metros like New York, Los Angeles, and Boston don’t is the local political and regulatory permission to keep building. Single-family home construction permits in the area rose by more than 52% in 2023 alone, and new home sales in Celina specifically jumped 61% comparing April 2025 to April 2026.
Community Impact’s analysis of the same Census release counts eight Texas cities among the nation’s fastest-growing overall (a broader set than just the 20,000-plus population cutoff used in the top-15 table above), with buyers drawn by a specific combination: relatively affordable new-construction homes, available land on the metro’s outer edge, and highly-rated school districts like Celina ISD and Prosper ISD. It’s a formula that has little to do with the state’s oil-and-gas image and everything to do with land-use policy and school quality — the same pattern shows up in Fulshear, west of Houston, which the Texas Tribune confirms is the state’s second-fastest-growing city on the same 2025 data.
U-Haul’s Different Answer: Ocala, Florida’s Three-Peat
Measured by net truck-rental volume instead of percentage growth, U-Haul’s 2025 Growth Index puts an entirely different city on top: Ocala, Florida, which held the #1 growth-city spot in 2022, 2024, and again in 2025. Florida dominates this version of the list even more heavily than Texas dominates the Census ranking — the state claims 8 of the top 10 growth cities and 12 of the top 25, with North Port, Kissimmee, and Clermont joining Ocala in the top five, alongside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Notice that none of U-Haul’s top Florida cities appear anywhere on the Census Bureau’s percentage-based top 15 — and none of the Census Bureau’s Texas exurbs appear on U-Haul’s list. That’s not a contradiction; it’s the direct result of measuring percentage growth in mid-size towns versus raw self-move volume in larger established cities.
The Fastest-Growing Metro Areas — And the Biggest Absolute Gains
At the broader metro-area level, Census data tells yet another version of the story. Ocala’s metro area recorded the nation’s fastest growth pace among all metros at 3.4%, followed by Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina at 3.2%. But in raw numeric terms, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands added roughly 126,700 residents — the largest gain of any metro in the country — followed closely by Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington at nearly 123,600. Both metros grew at roughly double the pace of the next-largest numeric gainer, Atlanta, which added 61,953 residents.
On U-Haul’s metro-level index, Dallas-Fort Worth repeated as the #1 growth metro from 2024, with Texas metros claiming the top three spots overall (Dallas, Houston, and Austin) and six of the top 25. Charlotte, Phoenix, Nashville, Charleston, Raleigh, Atlanta, and the Brownsville-McAllen corridor rounded out U-Haul’s top 10 — a list that overlaps meaningfully with Census’s metro-level gainers, even though the two rankings use completely different math.
The Sun Belt Slowdown Nobody’s Talking About
The most counterintuitive finding in this year’s data isn’t which city grew fastest — it’s which Sun Belt darlings are cooling off. According to reporting on the latest Census county-level migration data, Tampa’s domestic inflow dropped roughly 70% in a single year, Orlando’s net domestic inflow nearly vanished entirely, and Atlanta flipped from a net gain of 16,663 residents to an outright net loss. These were three of the most reliable growth engines of the early-2020s migration boom, and all three reversed course in the same data cycle that still shows Texas and Florida exurbs growing fast.
The lesson: “the Sun Belt is booming” and “specific Sun Belt metros are booming” are not the same claim, and 2025’s data increasingly separates the two. Growth is concentrating in a narrower set of exurbs and mid-size metros rather than spreading evenly across every historically popular Southern city.
The Midwest’s Surprise Comeback
At the same time Atlanta, Tampa, and Orlando cooled, Minneapolis and Indianapolis both flipped from net domestic outflow to net inflow in the most recent migration data — a reversal that gets far less coverage than the Texas exurb boom but represents a genuine shift in where American growth is concentrating. Waukee, Iowa’s appearance at #7 on the Census Bureau’s percentage-growth list (9.3%) is a smaller-scale version of the same pattern: Midwestern metros picking up growth that might, a few years ago, have gone almost entirely to Sun Belt destinations.
None of this means the Midwest has overtaken the South as America’s growth engine — the region still trails Texas and Florida by a wide margin in both percentage and absolute terms. But a metro flipping from net outflow to net inflow is a meaningfully different signal than a metro simply growing slower than it used to, and it’s the kind of shift that percentage-only or volume-only rankings can miss entirely if you’re not comparing multiple years of the same data source side by side.
State-Level Growth: A Different Leader Than You’d Expect
At the state level, the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates name South Carolina the fastest-growing state overall at 1.5%, ahead of Idaho (1.4%), North Carolina (1.3%), and Texas (1.2%). Texas nonetheless added more total residents than any other state — 391,243 — because its existing population base is so much larger. It’s the same pattern that runs through every ranking in this report: percentage growth and absolute growth consistently point to different states and different cities, and any single “fastest-growing” headline is only telling half the story.
One quick way to use this data: if you’re researching a city or metro for relocation, job-market, or investment purposes, check both the percentage-growth ranking and the absolute-numbers ranking before drawing conclusions — a small exurb growing 20%+ off a tiny base is a very different growth story than a major metro adding six figures of new residents.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Fastest-Growing Cities in 2026
Q: What is the fastest-growing city in America in 2026?
A: By percentage population growth, the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates name Celina, Texas the fastest-growing U.S. city with 20,000+ residents, at 24.6% growth. By U-Haul’s truck-rental volume method, Ocala, Florida is the top growth city for the third time in four years.
Q: Why are so many of the fastest-growing cities in Texas?
A: Six of the Census Bureau’s top 15 fastest-growing cities by percentage are in Texas, mostly exurbs of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. This reflects new-home construction concentrated on the outer edges of the state’s largest metro areas rather than growth in the core cities themselves.
Q: Is Florida still growing faster than Texas?
A: It depends on the measure. Texas dominates the Census Bureau’s percentage-growth city rankings, but Florida dominates U-Haul’s volume-based growth-city rankings, claiming 8 of the top 10 spots. At the metro level, Ocala, Florida posted the single fastest growth rate of any U.S. metro area in 2025.
Q: Are Atlanta, Tampa, and Orlando still growing quickly?
A: Not at their recent pace. Atlanta flipped from a net domestic migration gain of 16,663 to a net loss, Tampa’s domestic inflow fell roughly 70% year over year, and Orlando’s net inflow nearly disappeared, according to the latest Census county-level migration data.
Q: Which state grew the fastest in 2025?
A: South Carolina, at 1.5% population growth, according to Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates — ahead of Idaho (1.4%), North Carolina (1.3%), and Texas (1.2%). Texas still added the most total residents of any state, at 391,243.
Q: Are any Midwestern cities among the fastest-growing in 2026?
A: Yes — Waukee, Iowa ranks #7 nationally on the Census Bureau’s percentage-growth list at 9.3%, and Minneapolis and Indianapolis both reversed from net domestic outflow to net inflow in the latest migration data, a notable shift after years of Sun Belt dominance.
Q: What’s driving growth in cities like Celina and Fulshear specifically?
A: Reporting on the same Census data points to available land, permissive local building policy, and highly-rated school districts on the outer edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metros. New home sales in Celina alone rose 61% year over year, and single-family construction permits in the area rose more than 52% in 2023.
The honest picture in 2026: no single “fastest-growing city” ranking captures the whole country. Texas exurbs win on percentage growth, Florida wins on raw growth volume, and several of the Sun Belt’s most reliable growth engines — Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando — are cooling at the same time the Midwest quietly starts gaining residents again.
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