The map below reveals that the people claiming German ancestry are the leading ethnic group in 20 of the USA’s fifty states. No other ethnic or racial group claims more than eight states as the leading self-identified group.

Over the decades, the U.S. Census has changed its methodologies in achieving an accurate count of nearly 340 million Americans, including their family ethnic origins, asking how they live and culling other useful demographic data. The final count of people in every state, county, city, town, and subdivision has an impact on the Federal funds each area receives and even the shapes of districts from which we elect our members of Congress.

The questions posed to American Census participants about their ethnic heritage have changed, just as other portions of the U.S. Census have evolved. So, the numbers and percentages of people claiming certain ethnic family heritages have grown or shrunk in ways that can seem inexplicable, moving from census to census.  

What seems to matter, a lot, is how the questions are framed and asked. Clearly, the “national origin” questions posed by the U. S. Census in 1990 are not the same questions asked in 2020 or in other years.

In discussing the impact of German immigration to America, many observers in 2025 mention that “44 million” or “46 million” German-Americans continue to make contributions to the USA.

However, the 1990 U. S. Census revealed about 59 million people identifying with German ancestry, and out of a much smaller total population base.   Since that year, the overall population of European-Americans has grown by about 20% or so. Hence, it would not be a stretch to extrapolate from the raw census data in 1990 to estimate that 72 to 75 million Americans will claim German ancestry in 2025. That is well over 20% of the USA’s total population.

This does not include the 1 million-plus Americans who mention Swiss ancestry, nor the 1 million self-identifying as having Austrian roots, nor those whose families claim to originate in other German-speaking lands.

Note that many, perhaps most, Americans are a mix of various ethnic and racial combinations. The number of people claiming 100% German heritage would be less than half of our 2025 estimate of about 75 million German-Americans. The same would apply to Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Irish-Americans, Cuban-Americans, et al. 

What is not ambiguous is this: Americans of German ancestry remain the single largest ethnic group in the United States.

About the Author

Hon. Herb Stupp,
the Vice Chairman of GAMHOF, served as the Commissioner of the New York City Department for the Aging (DFTA) under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani from 1994 to 2002.