Cars are driven on Fourth Avenue in downtown Anchorage on Oct. 7, 2024. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

Alaska’s population rose slightly between 2024 and 2025 and is now at its highest level since 2017, the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development announced Wednesday.

Alaska had an estimated 738,737 people as of July 1, 2025, the department said in its annual state population estimate.

The rise comes despite a revision that erased thousands of international immigrants that the U.S. Census mistakenly believed had moved to Alaska.

Last year, relying on Census figures showing that thousands of people had migrated to Alaska from other countries, the department estimated Alaska’s population at more than 741,000 people.

Since then, and after prodding from Alaska state demographer David Howell, the Census Bureau retroactively lowered the number of international migrants that came to Alaska, and this year’s state population estimate is significantly lower than the one published last year.

“We think (that) is more accurate given that people crossing the southern border aren’t very often making their way to Alaska,” Howell said.

With the extra residents removed and a new baseline in place, the state’s population grew on a year-over-year basis because the number of births in the state exceeded the number of Alaskans who died.

That natural increase — births minus deaths — of 3,389 people was greater than the number of people who moved out of the state.

Between 2024 and 2025, 1,740 more people moved out of Alaska than moved here. It was the 13th consecutive year of negative net migration in Alaska, extending the longest streak of negative net migration since 1945.