Polish › Culture › Polish in America: Statistics
This page collects what the U.S. Census actually says about Polish America — how many there are, where they live, and how fast the language is going. Every figure below is pulled from a named Census table and dated. Two of the findings, as far as we can establish, have not been published anywhere else.
Journalists and researchers: everything here is free to cite and the charts are free to reproduce — there is a copy-paste embed under each one. All we ask is the credit link.
Full permissions, methodology and CSV downloads are on our press & data page — including the exact Census table numbers behind every figure here.
1. The gap between ancestry and language
This is the single most important number on the page. Polish ancestry in America is enormous and stable. Polish speech is collapsing.
| Measure (2023) | People | Census table |
|---|---|---|
| Report Polish ancestry | 8,243,708 | B04006, ACS 1-year |
| Speak Polish at home | 514,558 | B16001, ACS 5-year |
| Were born in Poland | 402,060 | B05006, ACS 5-year |
Polish was the sixth most-reported ancestry in the United States in 2022, after German, English, Irish, American and Italian.
2. The decline, 1910 to 2023
| Year | Speak Polish at home (age 5+) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1910 | 943,781 | Decennial census |
| 1920 | 1,077,392 — peak | Decennial census |
| 1940 | 801,680 | Decennial census |
| 1980 | 820,647 | Decennial census |
| 1990 | 723,483 | Decennial census |
| 2000 | 649,649 | Decennial census |
| 2010 | 608,333 | Decennial census |
| 2019 | 521,002 | ACS 5-year, B16001 |
| 2023 | 514,558 | ACS 5-year, B16001 |
Of the 514,558 speakers in 2023, 327,685 also speak English very well and 186,873 speak it less than very well — so roughly a third are not fully comfortable in English.
3. Where the language survives — and where it did not
National averages hide the real story. When you divide Polish speakers by Polish-ancestry population state by state, the country splits almost in half.
| State | Polish ancestry | Speak Polish at home | Speakers per 100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Illinois | 789,582 | 166,889 | 21.1 |
| New Jersey | 445,431 | 60,905 | 13.7 |
| New York | 806,476 | 76,504 | 9.5 |
| Pennsylvania | 719,382 | 16,468 | 2.3 |
| Michigan | 744,210 | 16,661 | 2.2 |
| Wisconsin | 462,215 | 5,876 | 1.3 |
In Illinois, one in five people of Polish descent still speaks Polish at home. In Wisconsin, it is one in seventy-nine.
Michigan and Pennsylvania have nearly as many people of Polish descent as Illinois — and roughly a tenth of the speakers. The explanation is when the families arrived. Chicago and northern New Jersey kept receiving Polish immigrants through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, so there is a constant supply of native speakers. The Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin communities largely date to the industrial wave of a century ago, and have completed the shift to English.
4. The language is being held up by immigrants, not inheritance
Set the three headline numbers side by side and something uncomfortable appears.
There are 402,060 people living in the United States who were born in Poland. There are 514,558 who speak Polish at home. Those two groups overlap heavily — which means the number of American-born people speaking Polish at home is small, somewhere on the order of a hundred thousand, against 8.2 million who claim the ancestry.
And the Poland-born population is shrinking: 410,841 in 2019, 402,060 in 2023. The group sustaining the language is getting smaller, which is why the speaker count keeps sliding while ancestry holds near eight million.
Put plainly: Polish in America is not mostly being passed from parent to child. It is mostly being carried by people who arrived already speaking it.
5. Polish ancestry over time
| Year | Polish ancestry (alone or in combination) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | 8,228,037 | Decennial census |
| 1990 | 9,366,106 | Decennial census |
| 2000 | 8,977,444 | Census 2000 |
| 2019 | 8,969,530 | ACS 1-year, B04006 |
| 2022 | 8,249,491 | ACS 1-year, B04006 |
| 2023 | 8,243,708 | ACS 1-year, B04006 |
In the 2020 Census, 2,686,326 people reported Polish ancestry alone, and 8,599,601 alone or in combination with another ancestry.
6. Where Polish America lives
From the 2020 Census, the four largest state populations by Polish ancestry alone or in combination: Illinois 857,583, New York 788,624, Michigan 752,515, Pennsylvania 710,565.
At county level, Cook County, Illinois — Chicago — is the centre of Polish America with 411,639 people of Polish descent, of whom 202,969 report Polish ancestry alone. Erie County, New York — Buffalo — has 147,201.
7. How they got there
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1608 | Polish craftsmen are among the first skilled workers at Jamestown, Virginia |
| 1854 | Panna Maria, Texas — the first permanent Polish settlement in the United States |
| 1870s–1914 | More than two million Poles emigrate to the United States (Library of Congress) |
| 1948 | About 140,000 Polish displaced persons, war victims and veterans admitted after the Second World War |
| 1980s–2000s | A further wave, concentrated in Chicago and the New York metropolitan area — the reason those two places still have living Polish speech |
Use the whole thing
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Methodology and sources
All population figures come from the United States Census Bureau. Census Bureau output is a work of the U.S. federal government and is in the public domain.
Tables used: B04006 (People Reporting Ancestry) · B05006 (Place of Birth for the Foreign-Born Population) · B16001 (Language Spoken at Home by Ability to Speak English) · 2020 Census detailed race and ethnicity tables · decennial census language counts for 1910 to 2010.
Ancestry figures use American Community Survey 1-year estimates; language and place-of-birth figures use 5-year estimates, which are more reliable for smaller populations. Figures for 1910 to 2010 come from the decennial census and are not directly comparable with ACS estimates — the chart marks the join. The speakers-per-100 ratio in section 3 was calculated by us from tables B16001 and B04006 and is not a Census Bureau statistic.
Historical immigration figures: Library of Congress classroom materials on Polish immigration; U.S. Senate records on post-war displaced persons.
Retrieved from data.census.gov in August 2026. This page is updated when new ACS estimates are released.
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