Veteran Population by State: Why There Are Fewer Every Year

The Census Bureau's answer for 2025 is 15,746,228. That is the number of civilians aged 18 and over in the 50 states and the District of Columbia who told the American Community Survey they had served on active duty in the armed forces and were no longer serving. The survey's margin of error, at 90% confidence, is plus or minus 85,315. Puerto Rico, surveyed separately, adds 62,071 veterans.

The VA's answer is higher. Its VetPop2023 model starts from VA and Defense Department records, blends in census survey data for older ages, and projects 17,587,687 living veterans for 30 September 2025 and 17,260,286 for 30 September 2026, counting those abroad and in the territories too.

Even inside the 50 states and DC the model runs about 11% above the survey, and most of the gap sits among younger veterans: in 2023 the survey found 75% as many veterans under 35 as the model did, but 96% as many aged 65 to 74. Neither the VA nor the Census Bureau says why.

Both measures put veterans at a small and shrinking share of adults. The 2000 census counted 26.4 million civilian veterans, 12.7% of adults. The 2025 survey's 15.7 million is 5.9%.

Texas has the most veterans of any state, 1,446,930 in 2025. Florida has 1,318,557 and California 1,254,746. Together the three hold 4,020,233 veterans, 25.5% of the national total, and they are the only states above a million. Florida has fewer adults than Texas but more veterans per adult, 7.0% against 6.0%, and California the lowest rate of the three, 4.0%. The VA's model puts California 2,819 ahead of Florida, close enough to call a tie.

After the top three the counts fall by half. North Carolina has 646,491, Virginia 623,047, Georgia 596,611 and Pennsylvania 588,783. Georgia and Pennsylvania are within each other's margin of error and cannot be ranked against each other. Ohio (561,908), New York (524,170) and Illinois (450,893) complete the top ten, with Arizona 11th at 449,601, a gap to Illinois well inside the margin.

A count map is mostly a population map: Texas, Florida and California are also the three most populous states. The smallest counts belong to the District of Columbia (19,902), Vermont (33,009), Wyoming (37,969), North Dakota (39,118) and Rhode Island (42,095).

Measured against each state's adults, the order changes. Alaska leads at 9.7%, with 53,052 veterans among 545,864 civilian adults. Virginia follows at 9.0%, then Montana at 8.6%, Wyoming at 8.2% and South Carolina at 8.0%. Alaska's lead over Virginia is about the size of the survey's margin of error, and Montana and Wyoming overlap, so the top five read better as a group than as a strict order.

South Dakota and New Mexico (7.8%) and Hawaii (7.7%) come next. Virginia is the only state in the top five by both count and share.

The lowest shares are in the Northeast and in California: New York at 3.3%, New Jersey 3.4%, the District of Columbia 3.5%, Massachusetts 3.8% and California 4.0%. New York still has the ninth largest number of veterans, 524,170, because it has so many adults.

Puerto Rico is not on the map, which covers the 50 states and DC. Its 62,071 veterans are 2.3% of its adults, lower than any state.

The short answer is arithmetic. In its VetPop2023 model the VA projects 524,569 veteran deaths in fiscal 2025, the year to 30 September 2025, about 1,437 a day. The model's total falls by 333,554 over the same year, which implies roughly 191,000 people became veterans. Deaths outnumber new veterans by about 2.7 to 1.

The Defense Department's estimate of the inflow is close: more than 200,000 service members, including reservists, move from active duty to civilian life each year, according to a June 2024 Congressional Research Service report.

In the VA's series the total is lower in every year than the one before, from fiscal 2001 to the projected fiscal 2026. The fall was largest at the start, 574,273 in fiscal 2001, and has narrowed since; the model has it at 327,401 in fiscal 2026. The Census survey shows the same direction with one blip: its 2025 count is 44,982 above 2024, a difference well inside the survey's margin of error. The death figures are the model's projections from its 2023 base, not recorded counts.

The veterans dying now are mostly the large cohorts of the mid-twentieth century. The 2000 census counted roughly 5.7 million Second World War veterans; the 2025 survey finds about 41,600. Korean War veterans fell from roughly 4.0 million to about 367,000 over the same years. Vietnam-era veterans, the largest wartime group in 2000 at about 8.4 million, numbered about 4.9 million in 2025.

Age follows from that. In the 2025 survey 49.7% of veterans were 65 or older and 30.5% were 75 or older. The VA's model puts the 65-and-over share at 45.8% for fiscal 2025, up from 35.9% in 2000, and keeps deaths above 500,000 a year through fiscal 2027 as Vietnam-era veterans move past 75.

The largest group now is the Gulf War era: everyone who has served since August 1990, including in Afghanistan and Iraq. The VA's model counts 9.1 million of them in fiscal 2025, 51.8% of all living veterans. Service eras overlap, since one person can serve in more than one, so these groups cannot be added together.

Veterans come from people who served, and fewer people serve. The last draft calls went out in December 1972, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the end of conscription on 27 January 1973, and the authority to induct expired on 30 June 1973, according to the Congressional Research Service. The military has been all volunteer since.

It has also become smaller. Active-duty end strength was 2,198,687 in fiscal 1973 and 2,163,578 in fiscal 1987, the high point of the 1980s, according to Defense Department figures compiled from Defense Manpower Data Center records. It was 1,370,678 in fiscal 2000 and 1,273,382 in fiscal 2023, 41.1% below the 1987 level.

A force of about 1.3 million, with around 200,000 leaving active duty in a year, cannot replace generations that passed through a draft-era military of more than 2 million. That link is FactsFigs' reading of the numbers: the sources give the force sizes and the dates, not the causation.

The VA's model expects the decline to continue at a slowing pace: 13,363,515 living veterans in fiscal 2040 and 11,573,129 in fiscal 2050, an average fall of 1.6% a year over its 30-year horizon. The projection rests on assumptions about how many people will leave the military and how long veterans will live, so it is a planning estimate, not a certainty.

Women are the one group the model holds roughly steady, at about 2.1 million. The 2000 census counted 1,593,254 women veterans, 6.0% of the total; the 2025 survey counts 1,788,236, or 11.4%. Because the number of men keeps falling, the VA projects women will be 18.7% of veterans by fiscal 2053.

The map uses the 2025 American Community Survey, released on 29 October 2026, about six weeks late after the October to November 2025 funding lapse cut its sample. Only 2 of the 51 state figures differ from 2024 by more than their margin of error, so the counts show no sign of a problem, but they cannot show that any one state gained or lost veterans in a year.

Veterans abroad and in Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands are outside the survey; the VA's model counts 94,419 of them together for fiscal 2025.

The national line is the VA's model, not a head count. Values to fiscal 2023 are estimates and 2024 to 2026 are projections, drawn dashed until the VA publishes a newer model. The line's 17.3 million and the map's 15.7 million measure different populations and are not meant to match.