NEW YORK CITY — The Big Apple keeps getting bigger.
The city's population swelled to 8,336,697 in July 2012 — its record high — according to new population stats released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday.
The number represents a 2 percent bump from 2010, when 161,564 fewer people called the city home, according to the figures, which show the city has been gaining roughly 74,000 new residents each year, the city's Department of City Planning noted.
Brooklyn was the fastest-growing borough, with an increase of 2.4 percent — or about 60,900 people — versus 2010. That means the borough has added roughly 28,000 people per year since 2010 — far more than the 4,300 average increase during the prior decade, the Department of City Planning noted.
The second-fastest growing borough was Manhattan, which swelled by 2.1 percent (or 33,300 people), followed by Queens, which grew by 1.9 percent (42,000 people) and the Bronx, which grew 1.7 percent (23,400 people.)
Staten Island showed the smallest gains over the 27-month period, with just a .4 percent percent bump — or fewer than 2,000 people.
Still, city officials cautioned that the gains might be exaggerated because of errors in the 2010 Census count.
"While there is little doubt that New York City has experienced a substantial population increase post-2010, it is probably overstated," City Planning noted in an early review of their numbers, which argued that the tally undercounted the populations of Brooklyn and Queens in 2010, making the gains in 2012 seem larger.
The city estimated that surveyors left approximately 65,000 people uncounted in 2010.
The numbers also show that the city is growing far faster than the rest of the state, which grew by about 1 percent to 19,570,261 last year. Thanks to that faster clip, the city's population now comprises 42.6 percent of New York State's population, up from 42.2 percent in April 2010.
