After a Covid-19 boom, Vermont is once again losing residents. What changed?

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Jenny Hopkins moved to Hinesburg from Austin, Texas, just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world.

So when she first struggled to find a primary care doctor or reach a gynecologist with a health emergency, she chalked it up to Covid-era challenges with the health care system.

But years down the line, she found herself in the middle of a post-partum mental health crisis. She went to the local clinic, saying, “I don’t know what’s going on. Here’s all of my problems on the table. Can you help me?”

Her provider at the time gave her a referral for a psychiatric evaluation. Hopkins followed up on that referral, week after week. It took nine months to finally get an appointment.

“I needed help more at that point than I probably ever had in my life,” Hopkins said. “And nine months later, I got my first psych eval, and I just had like, white-knuckled it.”

That delay in care was an “eye-opening” moment for her that Vermont was not meant to be her home. About six months ago, her family made the leap to southern Maine.

“People (in Maine) still talk about the care being difficult to get here,” she said. Yet, “I’ve gotten mammograms as soon as I needed them. We all have primary care. We all have dentists that accept our insurance. It’s just been night and day on that side.”

Hopkins is not alone. According to recent U.S. Census Bureau data, 726 more Americans left Vermont than came to it between 2024 and 2025, the lowest domestic migration the state has had in years.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Vermont had been losing residents to domestic migration for years. But in 2020 and 2021, the state experienced an influx of transplants, many reportedly seeking a closeness to nature during lockdown and enabled by the rise in remote work.

That trend has apparently reversed. And when combined with a low birth rate and high death rate due to Vermont’s aging population, the state lost population between 2024 and 2025, ranking it the lowest state in the nation for population growth.

Vermont still gained some residents from international migration, as it has in previous years. But even that form of migration has apparently slowed down. The state gained just over 600 new people from international migration between 2024 and 2025, compared with more than 1,000 per year for the three prior years.

Ken Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said some experts believe net international migration may fall to zero in the coming year because of federal immigration crackdowns.

Johnson follows the New Hampshire demographic data very closely. He said Vermont and New Hampshire have similarities, as northern New England states with large rural areas and aging populations.

“If Vermont or New Hampshire or Maine are going to grow, they’re going to grow through migration,” Johnson said. “They all have more people dying in them than being born.”

But New Hampshire has one key difference in its geography: It’s close enough to Boston to enable commutes there.

“Part of what’s happening in New Hampshire is they’re getting the spillover at the outer edge of the metropolitan area, which is happening in metropolitan areas all over the United States,” he said. Vermont doesn’t have the same advantage.

He did offer the caveat that Vermont gained about 1,700 people between 2020 and 2025, so he would still say that its population is growing — just very slowly.

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This story was originally published by VTDigger and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.