Texas Metro Areas Are Coming for Chicago

The nickname “Second City” wasn’t bestowed upon Chicago as a title of distinction. When author A. J. Liebling bestowed that sobriquet in writings that were later published in his 1952 book, Chicago: The Second City, he didn’t mean “second only to New York.” He meant “secondary,” or maybe “second-class.” He lived in Chicago, and he hated it. Chicagoans eventually embraced being the Second City, especially after they fell to third, when Los Angeles surpassed the metro in the early eighties.

Chicago is still the nation’s third-largest metropolitan area, according to U.S. census data released this week that estimate population totals for the year 2025—but, looking at the trends since 2020, it’s likely that Dallas–Fort Worth will supplant Chicagoland before too long. Let’s explore the takeaways from the newly released data. 

Dallas–Fort Worth Is Poised To Surpass Chicago

According to the census data, as of 2025, 9,434,123 residents are spread across the Chicago region. The Metroplex, meanwhile, is home to 8,477,157.

While that million-person difference is a lot, Chicago’s population has been stagnant for years; the area has actually lost a couple thousand residents since 2020, with fluctuations year over year. DFW, meanwhile, has a rocket strapped to its proverbial back; in 2020, only 7,667,416 folks lived in the region, which means the Metroplex has added an average of just over 160,000 people each year. If Chicago remains anemic and DFW continues to boom at the same rate, that means Dallas–Fort Worth would be the nation’s third-largest metro area around 2031 (at which point, presumably, Chicagoans will cling even tighter to the “Second City” moniker). 

And DFW isn’t the only metro on Chicago’s heels. The Houston–Pasadena–The Woodlands metropolitan area added nearly as many residents as DFW over that same five-year period. There are half a million fewer Houston-area residents than DFW ones, but if current trends hold, by around 2036, Houston should slide into fourth place. (As some consolation to depressed Chicagoans, they should hold on to fifth place for a while after that, as the metro areas currently behind Houston are quite a bit further back, and they aren’t growing at nearly the same rate as the Texas cities.) 

We Hit Peak Austin a Few Years Back

Austin has been heralded as a tech-utopian dream city by some folks in the capital, and while it remains a growing area, it’s not the juggernaut it once was. For years, Austin and San Jose, California, ran neck and neck for the spot of the nation’s tenth-largest city, but they’re now at numbers twelve and thirteen, respectively—and it’s Fort Worth that rounds out the top ten, with Jacksonville, Florida, behind it. 

That’s because Fort Worth, which grew by nearly 2 percent between 2024 and 2025, is the fastest-growing of Texas’s big cities, and by a considerable margin. Austin, meanwhile, grew by just 0.4 percent—which isn’t nothing, but the era of constant, accelerating growth in the state’s capital appears to have ended, perhaps putting slightly less strain on the city’s infrastructure. 

The rapid rise of Fort Worth isn’t a new story—the trend got noticed back in 2022—but the fact that Austin is growing more slowly than Houston and San Antonio might change the narrative of the city as an ever-growing hub of creative- and tech-minded talent that emerged over the past decade. 

What the Heck Is Going On in New Braunfels?

In addition to being outgrown by the other big cities in Texas, Austin is also being outpaced by a much smaller city nearby, and not just statistically. New Braunfels has a gaudy year-over-year growth rate of 5.1 percent, but it also added more total residents between 2024 and 2025 than Austin did—and by a lot. The year saw 4,025 newly minted Austinites, while New Braunfels exceeded that number by nearly 50 percent, adding 5,969 newcomers. There are now 122,492 New Braunfellas. That is more than six times what the city’s population was back in 1970.

It makes sense: New Braunfels is between San Antonio and Austin, relatively affordable, and charming as heck. 

The Boom Among New Suburbs Is Bonkers

The fastest-growing city in the United States? That’s Celina, Texas, a spot on the map north of U.S. 380 at the tip-top of the Metroplex. (To get to a Cowboys game from Celina, you’re facing a hundred-mile round trip.) Celina grew by 24.6 percent between 2024 and 2025, which means that statistically, one out of every four people you see shopping for groceries at the Brookshire’s moved there last year. 

What accounts for Celina’s boom? Mostly, it’s that the city basically didn’t exist fifteen years ago; Celina, currently home to 64,427 Texans, was a town of just 6,028 in 2010. According to The Texas Tribune, the city’s 36-year-old mayor moved there with his wife from Allen in 2017, “seeking a quieter, family-oriented neighborhood with good schools and a slower pace.” Celina: For when a bedroom community like Allen is too much of a bustling metropolis! 

Celina’s neighboring towns aren’t far behind it. There are five other DFW suburbs—Princeton, Melissa, Anna, Forney, and Greenville—among the ten fastest-growing cities in the country. (All but Forney are similarly situated on or above U.S. 380.) The Houston suburb of Fulshear (which grew by a similarly enormous 21 percent) and the Austin suburb of Hutto (a more modest 7.9 percent) are among the top ten too. 

Texas remains booming, in other words, even if the distribution of that boom has shifted somewhat—that looks like a slower Austin, steady growth in San Antonio and Houston, an even more massive Metroplex, and suburbs that envelop small towns.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and Texas Monthly receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism.