Charleston has edged past Columbia as South Carolina’s most populous city, according to population estimates the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.
The bureau estimates Charleston had 134,385 residents on July 1, 2016, and Columbia had 134,309, a margin of 76 people.
A year earlier, Columbia led 133,979 to 132,454 in the same estimates. Charleston added 1,931 people over the year, about 1.5%, while Columbia added 330.
The gap has been closing since the 2010 census, which counted 129,272 people in Columbia and 120,083 in Charleston.
The figures are estimates, not a head count. The next full count comes with the 2020 census.
Mount Pleasant grew faster still, reaching an estimated 84,170 residents, up 2,899, or 3.6%, from 2015. North Charleston, third in the state, had 109,298, up 765. Summerville had 49,323 and Goose Creek 42,039, the estimates show.
Elsewhere in the state, Greenville grew 5.8% to 67,453, the fourth-fastest rate among U.S. cities with at least 50,000 people, the bureau said.
The South had 10 of the nation’s 15 fastest-growing large cities, led by Conroe, Texas, at 7.8%, according to the bureau.
“Overall, cities in the South continue to grow at a faster rate than any other U.S region,” said Amel Toukabri, a demographer in the bureau’s population division. “Since the 2010 Census, the population in large southern cities grew by an average of 9.4 percent.”
