Who counts in 2030

On September 10, 2026, the Census Bureau proposed changing who gets counted for congressional apportionment. Under proposed section 60.4, foreign citizens are counted only if they are “either citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States.” Everyone else — people on student and work visas, people awaiting asylum decisions, people here illegally — would be, in the rule’s words, “[n]ot counted for apportionment.”

The comment period closes October 13, 2026.¹

Who stops being counted

The rule draws its line at lawful permanent residence, not citizenship. Citizens count. Green-card holders count. Everyone else living here does not.

That removes about 11 million people from the apportionment base — out of roughly 23 million non-citizens in the country. Close to half the non-citizen population goes on being counted, which is why the effect below is about half the size of what a citizen-only count would produce.

Where those 11 million live is what decides the rest, and they are nowhere near evenly spread. The rule takes 5.9% of Texas’s projected population and 4.8% of California’s, against 1.5% of Wisconsin’s and 1.3% of Michigan’s — roughly four times as much, proportionally, from the first pair as the second. Apportionment divides a fixed 435 seats by relative population, so a state loses ground whenever it is cut harder than the rest. No state has to lose a single resident for its delegation to shrink.

Three seats move

The middle column is the story most people already know: on current trends, twelve seats move between sixteen states between 2020 and 2030, with Texas up four and Florida up three. The right-hand column is what the proposed rule would do on top of that — and it is a much smaller change. Three seats, six states.

Texas loses

The obvious reading of this rule is that it helps Republicans. The arithmetic is not that clean.

Texas is projected to gain four seats by 2030 under current rules — the largest gain in the country. Under the proposed rule it gains three. Texas grew the way it did partly through immigration, and a rule that stops counting part of that growth takes back some of what it gave.

The seats do land in states Trump carried in 2024 — Michigan, Tennessee, and Wisconsin — so the net is two seats toward Trump-won states and two away from Harris-won ones. But a net of two, at the cost of a Texas seat, is a narrow return on a change this disruptive.

State by state

Six states change hands, and they divide into two kinds. Three are cut deeply enough to lose a seat. Three are cut so lightly that they gain one without anything happening to them at all.

Texas gains three seats instead of four

Texas has the largest projected gain in the country — four seats, on the strength of a decade of growth. The rule removes 5.9% of its projected population, a bigger share than any other state, and takes one of those four seats back. Much of what Texas grew by is what the rule stops counting.

California loses a fifth seat

California is already projected to fall from 52 seats to 48 on population trend alone. The rule removes 4.8% of its count and takes a fifth. It sits about 228,000 people short of holding that seat — the largest single loss on the board, and the one least sensitive to how the rule is read: California loses at least one seat under every version of it.

Illinois loses a second seat

Illinois drops from 17 to 16 on trend, and the rule takes it to 15. Its margin afterward is thin in both directions: the seat it keeps is held by about 35,000 people, one of the closest calls in the country. A different estimate of the excluded population would not save the seat it loses, but it could easily cost another.

Michigan keeps the seat it was going to lose

Michigan is projected to fall from 13 seats to 12. Under the rule it stays at 13 — not because anything changed in Michigan, but because 1.3% of its population is excluded against 4.8% in California and 5.9% in Texas. Nothing had to happen here for the delegation to survive.

Wisconsin also keeps one it was losing

The same story as Michigan, and the narrowest margin in the set. Wisconsin goes from 8 seats to 7 on trend and back to 8 under the rule, holding that eighth seat by roughly 49,000 people. It is the first seat that would move if the excluded population were estimated slightly differently.

Tennessee gains outright

Tennessee holds at 9 seats under current projections and reaches 10 under the rule. It is the only state in the set that gains a seat it was not otherwise in line for. Its 10th is held by about 71,000 people.

Where the people who keep counting live

Half the non-citizen population goes on being counted, so where that half lives matters as much as where non-citizens live — and the two maps are not the same.

DHS publishes lawful-permanent-resident estimates by county for the fifty largest metro areas.² Set those against the ACS non-citizen count for the same counties and the share still counted swings from 17% to 70%:

Miami and Los Angeles make the point. Los Angeles has not quite twice Miami’s non-citizen population, but more than four times as many people the rule would stop counting — 1.26 million against 310,000. A count of non-citizens alone would put those two metros in the same category. Under this rule they are not remotely alike.

One caveat matters for reading these. DHS records an LPR at the state or county where they obtained that status, not where they live now, and for anyone who arrived since 1980 there is no update.² Long-settled gateways — New York above all — therefore carry green-card holders who left decades ago, which inflates the share shown as still counted. The direction of that error is known; its size is not.

Mapped, the difference is stark. This is not a shaded-county map: each tract contributes its own value and the space between is a distance-weighted blend, contoured like a weather chart. It shows the share of everyone — not of non-citizens — who would stop being counted, because that is the quantity that moves representation.

The country is mostly pale. The rule reaches 10% or more of the population in a handful of places: the Central Valley, metropolitan Los Angeles, the Rio Grande Valley, the corridor from New York into northern New Jersey, and pockets around Chicago, Houston, Dallas and Yakima. Half of all tracts sit below 1.8%.

Two things about how to read it. The surface stops where its subject does — where almost nobody lives, nothing is drawn, which is why the interior is full of holes. And the hatched country is where DHS publishes no county estimate, so the share still counted is the state-wide figure rather than a local measurement; about a quarter of the non-citizen population lives there.

How solid is this

Reasonable people will estimate the excluded population differently, so it is worth asking how much the answer depends on that choice. Bounding it from both sides:

The first two rows come from genuinely independent sources — one from DHS estimates of the lawful permanent resident population, the other from Pew’s estimates of the unauthorized population — and they land within 1.6 million of each other and give the same answer. The third row is the citizen-only count that is not what was proposed; it is here as the ceiling, and note that even at that ceiling only six seats move.

Across all three scenarios the same states move the same way: Illinois and Texas lose, Michigan, Tennessee, and Wisconsin gain. That much is solid.

How solid is a harder question than it looks, because the last few seats are always decided by very little. A seat is worth about 784,000 people in 2030. Under the proposed rule, Wisconsin holds its eighth seat by roughly 49,000 of them and Tennessee its tenth by 71,000 — under a tenth of a seat either way. Illinois, one of the three states that loses, holds the seat it keeps by about 35,000.

And the closest call on the whole map belongs to a state that does not appear in the table at all: South Carolina finishes some 16,000 people short of an eighth seat, a quarter of one percent of its population. Any of these could land the other way on a different set of assumptions, or on the actual count.

Inside the states

Apportionment decides how many seats a state gets. Districting decides where the lines fall, and there the rule bites differently. Districts must hold equal population, so a district that loses part of its count has to reach further out to get back to the line — absorbing neighboring territory, and with it neighboring voters.

Running the districts actually in force for the 2026 election — the ten states that redrew mid-decade included³ — against a citizens-and-green-card-holders base:

Lean is the two-party margin in the 2024 presidential race, except * New Jersey, where 2020 is the most recent result published at block level.⁴

Across all 429 districts in multi-district states the tilt is consistent: Democratic- leaning districts sit 0.8% below their state’s new ideal on average, Republican-leaning ones 0.7% above. Of the fifty most underpopulated districts, forty-one lean Democratic. Map-drawers in most states would be moving people out of Republican districts and into Democratic ones — the raw material for a favorable redraw.

That pattern is cleaner than it first appeared, and the reason is worth stating. On a state-wide estimate of who keeps counting, the two worst-hit districts in the country were Miami-Dade seats that voted for Trump — a genuinely awkward result for the story above. Using the county figures instead, Florida’s 27th goes from 8.8% short to 1.3% short, and drops off the list entirely. Metro Miami is the most green-card-heavy place in the country, so a state-wide share badly overstated what the rule takes from it. The awkward case was an artifact of the coarser assumption.

What this does not capture

Two other parts of the proposal are harder to model and could matter as much as the population base. Proposed section 60.2 would require that a person’s residence be where they “lawfully spent the greatest number of days,” evidenced by tax records, and would compress the enumeration period to January 3 through April 1. Both narrow the count further in ways no population estimate here accounts for.

Nor does any of this address the constitutional question. The Fourteenth Amendment directs that representatives be apportioned “counting the whole number of persons in each State.” In Department of Commerce v. New York (2019) the Court rejected the last administration’s stated rationale for a citizenship question as “contrived,” and in Evenwel v. Abbott (2016) it upheld total population as a districting base without requiring it. Whether “persons” can be read to exclude lawfully present people on visas is a question for the courts, and it will get there.

Method

Apportionment is calculated by the method of equal proportions (Huntington–Hill), 435 seats, one to each state first — the method in use since 1941.

State population comes from Census Bureau vintage 2025 estimates, projected to 2030.⁵ The composition of each state’s population — citizen, non-citizen, lawful permanent resident — comes from the American Community Survey’s one-year estimates for 2005 through 2024,⁶ with LPR counts from the Department of Homeland Security⁷ and unauthorized estimates from the Pew Research Center.⁸ Each source is used for what it measures well: the Bureau’s estimates for how many people, the survey for who they are.

Projections weight recent years more heavily than older ones, because the 2020–21 population base is distorted by the pandemic and tells us less about 2030 than 2023–24 does. That choice matters, and it is why the middle column here moves twelve seats where the 2020-to-2030 map on this site moves thirteen: that map is fitted without the weighting. The rate of down-weighting changes nothing at all — every decay constant from 0.15 to 1.0 gives the same answer.

The district figures are present-day, not projected: 2020 census population by block with citizenship from the ACS five-year estimates,⁴ joined to the block assignment file for the plan each state will actually use in 2026.³ Blocks nest inside districts exactly, so nothing is interpolated — every state’s districts sum to its census population to the person. Two assumptions remain. Block data carries citizenship only for the voting-age population, so each district’s non-citizen count is scaled to all ages by its state’s ratio from the ACS. And the share of those non-citizens who hold green cards is taken from DHS county estimates where they exist,² weighted by how much of the district sits in each county, and from the state figure where they do not — which is the assumption the Florida result above turned on.

A projection is not a census. Small differences in state population can decide the last few seats, and the 2020 census itself missed people in fourteen states. The direction and rough size of these shifts are more trustworthy than any single state’s seat count.

Code and data: github.com/jcervas.