Recently, the 16 prefecture-level city cities in Anhui Province have all released the 2022 data on permanent residents. Compared with 2021, the five cities of Hefei, Chuzhou, Wuhu, Ma'anshan, and Xuancheng maintained a growth trend in their permanent population, while the other 11 cities saw a decrease in their permanent population. Among them, Hefei had the largest increase in population (up 169,000 people), while Fuyang had the largest decrease in population (down 30,000 people).

It is worth noting that the five cities that maintained a growth trend, except for Hefei, are all within the radiation range of the Nanjing metropolitan area. The permanent populations of the six cities in northern Anhui, namely Bengbu, Huainan, Huaibei, Fuyang, Bozhou, and Suzhou, all showed negative growth.

Currently, the permanent population of Hefei is 9.634 million, an increase of 169,000 people from the previous year. Its proportion in the total population of the province changed from 15.48% in the previous year to 15.72%, meaning a higher primacy ratio in population ranking.

According to the Hefei Municipal Bureau of Statistics, the growth of Hefei's permanent population is still mainly due to immigration. In 2022, the net number of migrates to Hefei was 135,000, contributing 1.4 percentage points higher to the total population growth compared with 2021.

The "Main Data Bulletin on Population Changes in Anhui Province from the Sample Survey in 2022", released by the Anhui Provincial Bureau of Statistics, shows that at the end of 2022, the province's permanent population was 61.27 million, an increase of 140,000 people or 0.23% over last year. Compared with the 61.03 million residents reported by the seventh national population census in Anhui Province in 2020, the increase totals 240,000 people, indicating an average annual increase of 120,000 in number and 0.2% in rate during the time span.