Every town, every census from 1910 to today — plus the Census Bureau’s brand-new 2025 population estimates. Who grew, who shrank, who peaked back in 1970, and what the raw federal data actually says about where Kankakee County is headed. All of it sortable, searchable, and sourced.
Read the story: where the county is shrinking, and why · Updated Sept. 15, 2026 with corrections. See what changed.
Kankakee County has been counted 17 times since 1860. It grew every single decade for 120 years, peaked in 2010, and has been sliding ever since. Here is the whole run.
Drag the year. Watch the county's towns trade places. In 1910 Bourbonnais was a village of 611 people and Kankakee was 23 times its size; today they are neighbors on the same chart. Hit play and watch it happen.
The whole dataset, sortable. Click any column header to re-rank. Click a town's name for its full profile. A blank cell means we show no figure for that year — see the note under the table for why. It never means nobody lived there.
Municipalities cover only part of Kankakee County. Townships cover all of it, with no gaps and no overlaps — so unlike the town figures, these numbers add up to the county exactly, every census. That makes them the honest way to see where the county's people actually moved, farmland included.
Pick up to four towns and put their curves on the same axis. Switch to indexed to strip out size and compare growth rates — every town starts at 100 in the year you choose.
The Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates start from an April 1, 2020 estimates base — the census count after the Bureau's later corrections and boundary updates — and the Bureau measures change from that base, not from the raw count. We do the same.
| Town | 2020 census | April 2020 base | 2025 estimate | Change from base | Percent |
|---|
Population change has exactly three inputs: births, deaths, and people moving. The Census Bureau publishes all three, and Kankakee County is losing on two of them. More residents have died than been born in each of the last five years — and that is new: Illinois Department of Public Health records show more births than deaths in the county in every year from 2010 through 2019, with deaths first outnumbering births in 2020. More people have moved away to other parts of the country than have moved in. Of the three net drivers — natural change, domestic migration and international migration — arrivals from abroad are the only one adding to the county, and they cancel out about half the domestic loss.
| Year | Births | Deaths | Natural change | Intl. migration | Domestic migration | Net change |
|---|
The 2020 census counted every resident's race and Hispanic origin. The American Community Survey fills in income, housing, schooling and commutes. Both are below.
| Measure | Kankakee Co. | Illinois | U.S. |
|---|
Kankakee County's neighbors, its downstate peers, and four nearby Indiana counties. Change since 2020 is measured from the Census Bureau's April 2020 estimates base, the way the Bureau measures it. Sort any column.
All of it is public federal data. Nothing here is modeled, smoothed, or estimated by us. Here is the exact source for each figure, including the places where the government's own published numbers disagree with each other.