GUILFORD COUNTY — Guilford County’s retirees are overwhelmingly white and becoming more numerous, while the working- and school-age populations have proportionately more Black, Hispanic and Asian residents than ever, according to the 2020 Census Demographic and Housing Characteristics data released Thursday.
The increasing ethnic diversity and aging of Guilford County — like the Triad and the rest of the country — were apparent in census numbers released in 2021, but this week’s new details from the 2020 census offer a breakdown that shows how differently the various ethnicities skew by age.
Perhaps the starkest illustration is that among non-Hispanic white residents, just 16% were under 18, while 23.4% were 65 or older — the first time that a census found more white Guilford residents of retirement age than of school age. In 2010, 18.4% were under 18 and 17.2% were 65 or older.
The only other groups with a double-digit percentage of their population 65 or older were non-Hispanic Black residents at 11.6% and Hispanic Blacks at 16.8%.
The heavy tilt of the county’s white population to older age groups skewed the county’s overall median age in 2020 to 39.4, higher than the national median age of 38.8. Among white, non-Hispanic residents the median age was 47, far higher than every other group.
The median among Black, non-Hispanic residents was 33; among Asians it was 32.8; and among Hispanics it was 25.4.
The median age has gone up for all groups, but it has not gone up as quickly among minorities as it has among whites, indicating greater growth in the number of young people for those groups.
That becomes starkly evident using a census tool online that shows age groups in five-year groupings in a “population pyramid,” with the youngest groups at the bottom and the oldest at the top.
Guilford County’s largest five-year age group overall in 2020 was ages 20-24, with more than 45,000 (8.3%) of the county’s 541,299 residents.
However, among just non-Hispanic whites, the largest groups were between 50 and 69, while the largest for Blacks were 15-24, with 20-24 the largest of all, at about 20,000 people, nearly half of the county’s overall 20-24 age group.
Among Hispanics of all ethnicities, the largest age groups were from 5 to 24, with the largest group 10-14 years old, more than 5,500 children.
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