WASHINGTON – Missouri remains the U.S. population center. Since 1980, the center site has varied, moving east across Missouri: 1980, DeSoto; 1990, Steelville; 2000, Edgar Springs; and 2010, Plato, near Springfield. The new center is Hartville, based on the 2020 census count of everyone who lived in the United States on April 1, 2020. The center of population is the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly, if everyone weighed the same. The population center point is marked with a survey monument by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Geodetic Survey, the U.S. government’s authoritative source for precise latitude, longitude and elevation measurements. Fixing the population center helps tell how fast and in what direction Americans are moving.