Few things change from day to day in Connecticut, but over the years, those little changes add up, and the “land of steady habits” is a different place than it was a decade ago. The origins of immigrants, housing affordability, voter turnout trends, employment, migration trends, overdose deaths, tuition costs, the number of high-need students, reliance on government aid and weather have all changed since the early to mid-2010s. Here’s a look at 10 ways Connecticut is becoming a different place. Immigration to Connecticut Hartford’s immigration court case backlog at the Hartford Immigration Court has increased by more than 2,000% in the past 10 years.  The most common types of cases in immigration court are immigration-related charges such as entry without inspection, visa fraud and failure to maintain legal status. Other charges cover diverse issues, such as public health concerns, labor violations or unlawful voting. For the 2025 fiscal year, the countries whose people account for the most cases are Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Guatemala and Columbia. All of these countries had exponential increases in the number of pending cases since 2015.  Ecuador had the biggest rise in the number of cases, with over 12,000 more cases in 2025 than in 2015, an increase of over 3,000%. Brazil had the second biggest increase in absolute numbers, with over 13,000% growth in the number of cases, over 7,000 cases. Peru’s backlogs grew by over 4,500 cases, and Guatemala’s grew by 3,800 cases.  In percentage terms, Colombia experienced the highest growth, with an increase of over 20,000%. From 2014 to 2025, the number of pending cases increased from about 2,000 to more than 46,000 cases.  Many immigrants have built their lives in the U.S. while navigating the uncertainty of their temporary residency status, and they're now fighting to secure permanent protection and stability within a complex immigration system. From 2015 to 2025, the average time it takes to conclude a case after its initial filing has increased by 67 days. In each year of the past decade, the average wait has been over 400 days, with a peak in 2021 with an average waiting time of 674 days.  Last year, advocates vowed to protect immigrant communities under a second Trump administration, in light of plans to carry out mass deportations. Housing affordability Fewer people in Connecticut are feeling the financial pressures of housing compared to 10 years ago.  Households that spend over 30% of their income on housing-related costs, including rent, mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities and maintenance, are considered cost-burdened. The share of cost-burdened households increased in 13 towns from 2012 to 2022, which is less than the previous year, when the share of cost-burdened households grew in 17 towns. The town with the largest share was Somers, with a 6.26 percentage point difference, going from 25.31% of cost-burdened households to 31.57%. From 2012 to 2022, independent of the income bracket each household was part of, the number of cost-burdened households decreased from almost 550,000 to a bit over 482,000.  Despite the decrease, in almost all income groups below $50,000, the majority of households of both renters and owners are cost-burdened. In 2012 and 2022, most households earning less than $75,000 were cost-burdened. Cost-burdened rates rose from 57% to 72% for households earning between $35,000 and $49,999 and from 41% to 46% for those earning between $50,000 and $74,999. For households earning $75,000 or more, rates of cost-burdened households remained much lower, decreasing from 16% to 10%. No matter the income groups, renters are consistently more likely to be severely cost-burdened than homeowners. Still unaffiliated, but slightly more Democratic In both 2014 and 2024, unaffiliated voters — those who chose not to join a political party — accounted for the biggest share of the electorate. But the number of towns that were majority Democratic increased over the decade. In 2014, unaffiliated voters accounted for the plurality of the electorate in 146 out of Connecticut’s 169 towns. In that same year, 18 towns were primarily Democratic and five towns were primarily Republican.  In 2024, the number of primarily unaffiliated towns declined from 146 to 140. The number of towns with a majority of Democratic voters rose to 26 while the towns with a majority share of Republicans declined to three towns.  Even though most towns favor unaffiliated voters, and in 2024 only three towns had a majority of registered Republicans, Republicans made gains in 153 towns in the 2024 general election. The town with the largest percentage point gain for Republican registration over the past 10 years is East Hartford, which saw an increase of 15.15%. For Democrats, Westbrook has seen the greatest increase in voter registration, with their share increasing by 25.92%. Hartford had the greatest increase in unaffiliated voter registration, with growth of 11.42%. Overall, in the past 10 years, the number of active voter registrations has grown by 17.60%, from 1,958,993 active registrations in 2014 to 2,303,767 in 2024.  Employment From 2014 to 2024, Connecticut's and national unemployment rates followed similar trends.  “CT's economy collapsed in 2008-2010 and has not yet recovered,” said Fred Carstensen, professor of finance and economics at the University of Connecticut. “In 2014, CT was still very much in the hole.” Unemployment rates were going down until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. During that time, the national unemployment rate reached 14.8%, while Connecticut's rate stayed 3 percentage points below at 11.8%.  After the pandemic, Connecticut’s unemployment rates remained about 1% higher than the rest of the United States until the beginning of 2023. In 2024, Connecticut’s unemployment reached its lowest level at 3.0%, below the national average of 4.1%.  “Look at March 2008, for peak employment,” Carstensen said. “We are still about 11,000 below where we were then. That said, even the growth since 2014 is weak.” CT’s overall labor force, people who are working or looking for work, grew to 1.88 million in 10 years by December 2023, according to the U.S. Labor Department. The number of people employed in Connecticut remained stable in the past 10 years, staying between 1.7 million and 1.8 million people. Migration in and out More people from Connecticut are moving to Florida and more people are coming to Connecticut from New York. From 2012 to 2022, the state that more Connecticut residents moved to was Florida, which has seen a 42.19% increase in outflow from 2012 to 2022. Florida has received over 155,000 people from Connecticut, about 17% of all people moving out of the state.  “As CT stagnated, CT residents took jobs out of state — and then paid their withholding to those states,” Carstensen said. “CT income tax revenue is down more than $500K because of jobs migrating out of state and the quality of jobs in CT declining.” The state with the second-highest gain of Connecticut residents is New York, with an 8% increase, followed by Massachusetts with a 4.4% increase. New York has a bit over 15% of all the people moving out of Connecticut, and Massachusetts has 9.5% of total outflows. “One reason unemployment has remained low is because people took jobs out of state with the growing economies of Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island,” Carstensen said. When it comes to people moving from other states into Connecticut, in the past 10 years, New York has been responsible for 33.70% of total inflows into Connecticut. New York also has had the highest growth in rate of people moving to Connecticut, increasing by 65.93%. Massachusetts was the state with the second-most inflows, at 10.7% of total inflows, and an increase of 49.46% in the number of inflows from 2012 to 2022. Florida follows with 8.64% of total inflows, a decrease of 8.45% in 10 years.  Inflow and outflow data are calculated by looking at year-to-year address changes reported on individual income tax returns. Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota are the states with the fewest people coming from and leaving Connecticut.  Overdose deaths  The number of accidental drug intoxication deaths in Connecticut has declined in the past two years, but it is still much higher than in 2015.  "We have seen a year-over-year decrease in overdose deaths, but we're probably still two times or three times higher than where we were then," Benjamin Howell, Yale researcher of the Connecticut Opioid REsponse (CORE) Initiative, said. In 2023, Connecticut saw a decrease in drug overdose deaths, with 1,338 fatalities — a reduction of 8.6% compared to the previous year, according to data from Connecticut Public Health. Early data from the first four months of 2024 suggests that trend may continue to decrease, even if the data is still preliminary.  Despite the overall decrease in deaths, fentanyl remains a major contributor to overdose fatalities. In 2015, 26% of intoxication deaths involved fentanyl. However, fentanyl and fentanyl-analog substances were involved in approximately 85% of cases in 2023. This figure shows a slight decline from 2022, in which 86% of the deaths were attributed to fentanyl, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. "A lot of times they were addicted to opioids,” said Patricia Collins, assistant U.S. attorney who works in The Heroin Education Action Team. “They were not addicted to heroin. They were not addicted to fentanyl, and they took one pill that contained fentanyl and died." There is a rising presence of xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer, in combination with fentanyl, in fatal overdoses according to the same Connecticut Public Health data. In 2024, xylazine was involved in 35.4% of overdose deaths, marking the highest rate since the combination was first detected in 2019. Xylazine-related deaths first peaked in 2022 and declined in 2023 but began climbing again in early 2024. In 2022, Connecticut had the second highest xylazine-related overdose death rate out of states with available data. Additionally, emerging substances like carfentanil, designer benzodiazepines and nitazenes are becoming more prevalent. While the number of deaths involving these substances remains relatively low, their presence is increasing. For example, carfentanil, a synthetic opioid, was involved in seven deaths in 2023, and five such deaths were recorded in just the first two weeks of August 2024. "The name of the program sort of indicates that when this started, fentanyl was not as huge of a problem as it has become,” said first assistant U.S. attorney Marc Silverman. “We were focused initially on heroin, but that evolved into just a real crisis involving fentanyl. … It's troubling because [new drugs are] even more powerful than the fentanyl that we've been seeing in recent years.” The Department of Justice and the DEA are making efforts to stop the flow of precursor chemicals, primarily originating from China, that are used to manufacture fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in laboratories in Mexico and the United States. "This is an issue that affects everyone. It’s one of the most pressing public health challenges of our time," said Emma Biegacki, program manager of the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine. Tuition prices In the past 10 years, college tuition has risen for both in-state and out-of-state students who attend public and private universities in Connecticut.  Among private universities, Yale College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University and Sacred Heart University had over a 40% increase in price. Fairfield University and Quinnipiac University also had tuition increases, at approximately 30%.  In terms of in-state tuition for public universities, UConn had the highest tuition increase, going from $9,858 in the 2014-2015 school year to $17,010 in the 2024-2025 school year, about a 72% increase. Connecticut State University schools have maintained the same price for in-state students in the past 10 years, with the price increase a little bit over 50%, going from $4,600 to $6,998. For out-of-state students, the tuition increase was around 40% at the Connecticut State Universities, going from $14,886 to $20,938, and 32% for UConn students. Only Eastern Connecticut State University saw a decline in tuition prices for out-of-state students, who are now paying almost 30% less than they did 10 years ago, going from $14,886 to $10,498. The numbers used were for first year full-time students, covering only the tuition costs and not including room and board, books and other fees. Schools that are part of the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities offer a different tuition rate for some out-of-state students as part of NEBHE rate (New England Board of Higher Education).  High-needs students In the past 10 years, the number of high-needs students has increased in Connecticut.  At the same time, the number of students enrolled in Connecticut schools has decreased by about 30,000. Even with a decline in total number of students, from 2014-15 to 2023-24, the number of high-needs students increased. High-needs students either have a disability, are an English learner, or are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. One student can be in more than one of these groups.  The percentage of high-needs students has increased by approximately 12.3%, while the non-high-needs student population declined by about 21.8%.  When broking down by student group, all high-need groups have grown. The number of English language learners in Connecticut schools rose by 5% since the 2014-2015 school year. A "bill of rights" for non-English-speaking parents was created after advocates shared accounts of their struggles to communicate with school officials. As the number of high needs students rise, Connecticut superintendents say they are worried about the rising costs of special education and federal relief money expiring. The number of children eligible for free or reduced-price meals has risen by 6% since 2014 and the number of students with disabilities has risen by 5%.  Reliance on government aid More people have been relying on government aid since 2012. The share of all incomes that consist of government transfers has increased gradually in Connecticut in the past decade, with a peak during the COVID 19 pandemic.  Government transfers include payments from programs such as Social Security, Medicare and veterans' benefits. The average government aid across all counties in Connecticut increased from over $9,300 per capita in 2012 to $14,170 in 2021, and has declined in 2022 to around $11,600. Government transfers currently represent close to 18% of all personal income in the United States, a significant increase from 8% in 1970, according to data from the Economic Innovation Group. In Connecticut, government transfers made up over 14% of state residents' income in 2012. By 2022, this share rose to 16%, staying behind the United States average. Weather Over the past 10 years, the average annual temperature in Connecticut has consistently stayed above 50°F.  From 2013 to 2023, the average annual temperature in Connecticut has been approximately 52°F. This is an approximate 2.05°F increase in annual temperatures when compared to approximately 50 years ago. From 2013 to 2023, the average annual temperature in Connecticut has reached its peak at 53.7°F in 2023, the highest temperature since 2013. With a few variations, the temperature has been on a constant increase in the past decade, according to data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental information.  In comparison to the decade between 1949 and 1959, the average annual temperature ranged from 47.4°F to 52.0°F, an overall lower average compared to the more recent years. Comparing the average temperatures between these two decades, there is an approximate 2.05°F increase in annual temperatures over these 54 years, going from an average of 49.9°F in the 1949 decade to an 51.95°F average in the past decade. From 2013 to 2023 alone, the temperature in Connecticut has increased 3°F, going from 50.7°F in 2013 to 53.7°F in 2023. In 2024, during hot days in the summer, Connecticut’s hospitals saw increased heat-related emergency room admissions, admitting about 30 people per week for heat-related illnesses. In terms of the average of the hottest temperatures calculated for each year, the growth in maximum temperature from 2013 to 2023 has been 2.7°F, while the growth in minimum temperature, the average of the coldest temperatures calculated for each year, has been 3.1°F. While the temperatures have been somewhat constant from 2013 to 2023, precipitation patterns have varied in Connecticut year to year within the same decade. Precipitation has increased over time, with the average annual rainfall rising from 43.07 inches during the 1949 to 1959 decade to 48.90 inches in the 2013 to 2023 period.  This trend of increased precipitation has become more evident in 2024, which has been wetter than average with some towns seeing more than 12 inches of rain in August after storms caused fatal flooding in the southwestern part of the state.  This increased frequency in rain and flooding has become a big problem in Connecticut, with an increasing number of extreme storms fueled by climate change.