LGBTQ+ People Are Now 12% of the Adult U.S. Population

Despite conservative attempts to suppress queer and transgender life across the United States, LGBTQ+ people are still coming out every day and living in our truths. A new Human Rights Campaign Foundation analysis of U.S. Census data found that LGBTQ+ people now make up 12% of adults across the country, a record high.The analysis looked at data from more than 2.4 million entries to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Plus Survey collected between 2021 and 2024, which was the last major effort by the federal government to collect information on gender identity before the Trump administration removed both sexuality and gender metrics from hundreds of federal surveys. The findings show that roughly 26.5 million people in the United States identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.Despite the common idea that LGBTQ+ gravitate to specific safe havens, the survey also found that LGBTQ+ make up over 10% of the population in 40 states, including electoral battleground states like Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Texas. Of the 25.6 million LGBTQ+ recorded in the analysis, 53% fall between the ages of 18 and 34. While the new metric is a record high, with Gallup recording only 9.1% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+ in 2025, the findings fall in line with several previous studies that have repeatedly shown an increase in people who identify as LGBTQ+ in the United States, especially among young people. The same 2025 Gallup survey found that 23.1% of Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ+, followed by 14% of millennials. Crucially, as many researchers have noted, this rising percentage may not reflect an increase in the rate of LGBTQ+ identity but rather increasing comfort levels with coming out. It’s worth noting that in 2025, Gallup released a poll that found only nine out of 10 LGBTQ+ people are out to someone in their lives, meaning the actual number of LGBTQ+ adults reported in the recent analysis could actually be even higher than reported. Also consistent with previous data tre