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AAPI Community By the Numbers

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and our friends at the U.S. Census has provided a quick fact sheet on key stats about diverse Asian Pacific Islander communities in the United States.


Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) make up the fastest growing racial group, and are projected to surpass 50 million in number by 2060. AAPIs are not a monolith: the community is one of the most diverse racial groups, representing dozens of ethnicities, cultures, and migration stories from across the world.

In the past decade, there have been significant improvements in the availability of data about AAPIs, on issues ranging from socioeconomic status to education, health, and civic participation. These efforts seek to educate the public about novel approaches to analyzing, interpreting, and presenting data about AAPIs, particularly data that are broken out by detailed origin (such as Filipino, Korean, Chamorro, etc.)

Local and national efforts to encourage government agencies to collect disaggregated data about Asian Pacific Islanders are continuing, despite lack of resources. Before its operations were suspended early this year, the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI) compiled a handy guide on "Best Practices for the Disaggregation of Federal Data on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders."

Note: The WHIAAPI web link directs to archived web pages that have been removed from the White House website.

Here's a quick snapshot of current data collected the Census Bureau. Click here for more Asian American Pacific Islander facts, and links to data sources.

 Asian Population

  • There is an estimated 21 million Asian Americans in the United States in 2015
  • In California, there are approximately 6.5 million Asian Americans in 2015. The state had the largest Asian population, followed by New York (1.8 million). Asian Americans represented 56.1 percent of the total population in Hawaii.
  • At 4.8 million, people of Chinese descent represent the largest Asian group. (This number does not include Americans of Taiwanese descent). The Chinese population is followed in size by Asian Indian (4.0 million); Filipino (3.9 million); Vietnamese (2.0 million); Korean (1.8 million); and Japanese (1.4 million).

Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Population

  • There is an estimated 1.5 million Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders residing in the U.S.
  • Hawai’i is home to 372,557 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders — the most of any state. California followed with 353,666.
  • It is estimated that there are 568,067 Native Hawaiian residents of the United States in 2015. The Native Hawaiian population was the largest detailed Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander (NHPI) group, followed by Samoan (202,937) and Guamanian or Chamorro (145,956).

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