Key takeaways
- Surpassing the record-setting high found in last year's report, the U.S. Latino GDP hit $4.1 trillion in 2023, showing once again that it equates to the fifth-largest GDP in the world.
- The economic contributions and performance of Latinos from 2019 to 2023 — including in the face of the pandemic — made the U.S. Latino GDP the single fastest-growing GDP among the world's 10 largest, surpassing even China.
- Despite representing only 19.5% of the U.S. population, Latinos were responsible for 30.6% of the growth of the national GDP since 2019.
Latinos have once again powered major growth for the U.S. economy, according to a new report from researchers at UCLA and Cal Lutheran. The annual U.S. Latino GDP report found that the total economic output, or gross domestic product, of Latinos in the United States hit a record high, reaching $4.1 trillion in 2023, up from $3.7 trillion in 2022.
Similar to last year's report, this data shows that the GDP of the U.S. Latino population equates to the fifth largest in the world compared to other economies, topping India, the United Kingdom and France.
The 2025 U.S. Latino GDP Report is the eighth annual release that documents the large and rapidly growing economic contributions of Latinos in the United States. Produced by the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture and Cal Lutheran's Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, the researchers found that even with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Latino GDP also saw the fastest growth among major economies, including China, and outpaced even the broader economy in the United States when comparing 2019 to 2023.
This marks a "growth spot" for the national economy overall, according to co-author David Hayes-Bautista, a distinguished professor of medicine at UCLA who began the effort to track this data more than two decades ago. The contribution of Latinos to the overall U.S. economy has climbed in subsequent years, hitting $1.6 trillion in 2010 and $2.8 trillion in 2019, he added.
"Now surpassing the extraordinary milestone of $4 trillion, the U.S. Latino GDP illustrates just how vital Latino strength and resilience are for the nation's economy," said Matthew Fienup, executive director of the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at Cal Lutheran and co-author of the report.
"As COVID-19 broke out, many researchers concluded that Latinos would face obstacles to maintaining their physical and financial security," said Hayes-Bautista, who also directs the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA. "But the U.S. Latino GDP has recovered faster than the national GDP, despite suffering more from the pandemic."
Several factors contributed to the rapid growth, researchers said. The report looked at health, higher education attainment, consumer spending, income, population, labor force size and households of Latinos — all areas that saw increased rates of change that helped the Latino GDP grow.
A few highlights:
- In every year from 2010 to 2023, Latinos made faster gains in education than non-Latinos, with the number of Latinos earning bachelor's degrees or higher increasing by 125.3%.
- In 2023, Latino consumption reached $2.7 trillion. That makes its buying power 5% larger than the entire economy of the state of Texas ($2.58 trillion) and 25% larger than New York's economy ($2.17 trillion).
- Between 2010 and 2023, Latinos contributed an average of 726,000 workers every year to the labor force in the United States. They were also responsible for 58.7% of the growth of the U.S. labor force since 2010.
When it came to health, 2023 showed a stronger bounce back from COVID-19 than the year before. During the pandemic, the virus spiked to become the leading cause of death for Latinos. But in 2023, COVID was no longer among the top five causes of death in the U.S., and deaths due to the virus were lower for Latinos than non-Latinos. Overall, the Latino population's lower death rates from COVID and other health-related causes helped further the return of the "Latino healthy lifestyle advantage," as Hayes-Bautista called it, with Latino life expectancy numbers nearly reaching the pre-pandemic level of 3.1 years longer than non-Latino whites.
"This year's report documents the continued rebound of the Latino healthy lifestyle advantage," said Hayes-Bautista. "It is one of the major factors that drives the Latino GDP's tremendous growth."
Among the 10 largest GDPs globally, the U.S. Latino GDP was the third-fastest growing from 2010 to 2023. It also increased 2.7 times faster than the national non-Latino GDP within the U.S.
The report found that despite being just 19.5% of the U.S. population, Latinos were responsible for more than half (56.7%) of U.S. population growth between 2010 and 2023, increasing by nearly 1.2 million in 2023. Latinos also accounted for 30.6% of the national GDP growth.
"A growing GDP benefits all Americans by providing for a higher standard of living, increased opportunities for socio-economic mobility and improved wages and salaries," Fienup said. "At the same time that the growing U.S. Latino GDP drives growth of the overall U.S. GDP, all Americans will benefit for years to come from Latinos' hard work, resiliency and optimism."
This year's release marks the 29th full-length report that the team has produced as part of the larger research initiative that analyzes the contributions of the Latino population across various geographies. With recent publications going into even greater detail about different segments of the population, including the inaugural Latina GDP report, as well as reports solely covering areas like California and Texas, the U.S. Latino GDP project seeks to demonstrate how the economic impact of Latinos touches every corner of the nation.
