Understanding where residents of the Wasatch Front will live and work in the future is essential to WFRC’s long-range transportation planning and to the efforts of local, regional, and state agencies and stakeholders. Every four years, WFRC updates forecasts for population, households, and jobs at the transportation analysis zone (TAZ) level as part of the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) process, ensuring that planning efforts align with projected growth and development trends.

The Wasatch Front is expected to continue to experience remarkable growth, with our Region continuing to be a hub for economic opportunity and vibrant communities. Population and employment are on the rise, fueled by a thriving economy, innovation, and a high quality of life. WFRC is currently working with local communities to update our forecasts. In the meantime, explore how the state’s population and housing is changing using the Household and Job Forecast Viewer below.

To support the population and employment forecasting process, WFRC collaborates with the Mountainland Association of Governments (MAG) to develop and maintain the Wasatch Front Real Estate Market Model (REMM). REMM is a development simulation tool, built on the UrbanSim software platform, that distributes future county-level growth projections developed by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute (GPI) to each of the Wasatch Front’s 3,500 transportation analysis zones (TAZ), which average about one square mile in size. REMM produces a projected count of the number of people, households, and jobs (by major economic sector) for each TAZ, for each future planning year through 2055. 

In addition to the county-level control totals provided by GPI, REMM relies on extensive data inputs specific to the Wasatch Front region to inform its simulation including:

In addition, data from REMM-related inputs summarized above are also available as publicly available interactive maps – designed to support planning work and general understanding of the regional landscape – and downloadable datasets.