A new report from Pew Research Center has examined the current state of the Black population in the United States, including information on Black Americans’ age structure, household type, income level, educational background, and more.
According to their review of the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey, Pew Research Center reports that the number of people who identify as Black living in the United States has grown from 36.2 million in 2000 to 48.3 million in 2023, an increase of 33 percent over the course of the twenty-first century. Over 5 million of Black Americans in 2023 were foreign born, a 7 percent increase from 2000.
The median age of Black people in America in 2023 was 32.6 years old, nearly six years younger than the total U.S. population’s average age of 38.2. Roughly 44 percent of Black Americans are under the age of 30, while 43 percent are between the age of 30 and 64. In 2023, about 5.8 percent of Black women between the ages of 15 and 44 had given birth within the previous 12 months.
The majority of Black Americans (56 percent) live in the South. About 17 percent of the Black population lives in the Northeast, 17 percent live in the Midwest, and 10 percent live in the West. The New York City metropolitan area had the largest share of the total U.S. Black population at 8 percent, followed by the Atlanta metropolitan area at 5 percent, and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area at 4 percent.
The overall median annual income for Black households in the U.S. in 2023 was $54,000, with about quarter of the population earning less than $25,000 per year and another quarter earning over $100,000 per year. The vast majority of Black people in the U.S. live in households that are either headed by a married couple (39 percent) or by a single woman (30 percent). Roughly 17 percent of Black people in America live in a non-family household.
In 2023, 27 percent of Black American adults have completed at least a bachelor’s degree, with 11 percent holding a graduate degree. Another 32 percent have completed some college without obtaining a bachelor’s degree and 30 percent have earned at most a high school diploma. About 11 percent of the Black American population have not completed high school, with 3 percent having completed less than a ninth grade education.