Alabama is home to four of the 100 fastest-growing metros in the United States, including one in the top 12.

Daphne-Fairhope-Foley, the metro area that’s home to Alabama’s beaches in Baldwin County, grew by 3% between July 2021 and July 2022. That was enough to rank as the 12th-fastest growing metro in the nation, according to recently released population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

It trailed a number of fellow Southern metros, including seven in Florida and two in the Carolinas. St. George, Utah, and Greeley, Co., were the only non-Southern metros in the top 12.

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Among other Alabama metros near the top of the list was the Huntsville metro, which ranked inside the top 50 at No. 41. Already Alabama’s second largest metro in terms of population, it grew 2.1% from 2021 to 2022.

The Auburn-Opelika metro in east Alabama grew by 1.8%, the 56th fastest rate in the nation. And the Florence-Muscle Shoals metro in far northwest Alabama just barely cracked the top 100, coming in at No. 99 with a growth rate of 0.9% from 2021 to 2022.

But not all Alabama metros faired as well. The Birmingham-Hoover metro area, for instance, was stagnant, neither growing nor shrinking significantly. The Birmingham metro is still by far the largest in Alabama, home to more than 1.1 million residents, more than twice as many as second-place Huntsville.

The Birmingham metro is unique because it has so many individual cities and towns – 77 in all – and population trends in the metro show the central core cities are losing people, while cities and towns on the outskirts of the metro are growing.

And the Mobile metro in south Alabama, just across the bay from fast-growing Daphne-Fairhope-Foley, shrank by 0.4%, the biggest population loss of any Alabama metro area.

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Alabama is home to 12 metro areas, plus part of the Columbus, Ga., metro. But there are also 14 micropolitan areas here. Among those smaller geographies, the two that grew the most were Albertville, near Lake Guntersville in northeast Alabama, and Cullman, just between Huntsville and Birmingham on I-65. Each of those added more than 1,000 people between 2021 and 2022.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Selma micropolitan area in the state’s Black Belt region lost about 800 people, or roughly 2% of its population.

Do you have an idea for a data story about Alabama? Or questions about Alabama that data may be able to answer? Email Ramsey Archibald at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @RamseyArchibald. Read more Alabama data stories here.