It doesn’t take long for a “transplant” to realize that being a Colorado “native” is a pretty big deal for some people. The term “native” can be seen on t-shirts and bumper stickers in nearly every gift shop around the Centennial State and it gets commonly used to describe someone who was born locally, worn like a badge of honor amid the many Colorado residents who merely opted to move to the state later in life. In recent years, it can seem as if people able to make the “Colorado native” claim are growing few and far between – but is that perception actually reality?

According to 2024 data provided by Census.gov, approximately 2,436,528 of Colorado’s 5,957,494 residents were born in Colorado. While that’s only 40.9 percent of residents, this compares to about 42 percent in 2018, 42.9 percent in 2014, and around 42.2 percent in 2010. In other words, data shows that this split has remained relatively consistent throughout the most recent decade-plus with a slight post-COVID shift of in-bound movers. That said, ‘transplants’ do indeed outnumber the ‘natives.’

While Colorado does fall among states with a higher share of transplanted residents, this is relatively common in the American West. Per a 2019 report, just 26.7 percent of Nevada’s residents were locally born, 39.6 percent of Arizonans, and around 42.4 percent of those living in Wyoming. The Midwest and Southern America tends to have the most residents stick around, but the East Coast has a similar number of transplants compared to Colorado, as does the northwest. In Florida, just 35.8 percent of residents were locally born.

States sending the most residents to Colorado are similar to what one might expect – 407,277 people born in California live in Colorado along with 220,960 Texans. Meanwhile, Illinois (164,049), New York (145,050), and Ohio (100,032) are also among top spots from where transplants tend to flock to the Centennial State.

Of course, the percentage of Colorado-born Coloradans can vary greatly by county. For example, in El Paso County – home to Colorado Springs and a large military presence – just 19.7 percent of residents were born in-state. This contrasts in a big way with southwestern Conejos County where 74 percent of residents were born in-state. Meanwhile, around twenty-eight percent of Denver County residents were originally from Colorado.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of people who are born in Colorado don’t end up staying in the Centennial State as life progresses. For example, this New York Times piece which accounts for data through 2012 shows that 35 percent or more of the people born in Colorado have left the state since 1930 with close to half of those individuals moving elsewhere in the American West.

So there you have it – while most of Colorado’s residents weren’t born in Colorado, the share of Colorado-born residents has remained relatively consistent over time with a slight shift in favor of transplants around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and the remote work surge. While it might feel like everyone you bump into was born somewhere else, that’s not quite the case.

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