How many people in Iowa speak a language other than English at home?
Refreshed annually
In 2024, about 295,200 people age 5 and older in Iowa spoke a language other than English at home. That's about one in 10 Iowans. Excluding English, Spanish is the most common language spoken in Iowa homes. About 50.1% of people speaking a non-English language spoke Spanish.
295K
people speak a language other than English at home (2024)
50.1%
Spanish's share of non-English language speakers (2024)
More than half of all people in Iowa speaking a non-English language at home spoke one of three languages: Spanish, Swahili or other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, or Other languages of Asia.
Spanish is the most-spoken non-English language in Iowa homes, followed by Swahili or other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa and Other languages of Asia.
People aged 5 or older who speak a language other than English at home, by language group (2024)
The ACS asks people if they speak a language other than English at home, what that language is, and how well they speak English. In Iowa, 295,200 people ages 5 and older spoke a language other than English at home in 2024, or 9.7% of the state’s population age 5 and older, compared with 23% nationally. Spanish was the most common non-English language, spoken by 148,000 people, and Iowa had 40 languages spoken at home. This data determines bilingual election requirements under the Voting Rights Act and has also been used to allocate funds for students with lower English proficiency.
Based on data from 2024, Iowa's residents were less likely to speak a non-English language at home than the population nationwide. While about 0.95% of the US's 5+ population lived in Iowa, the state was home to 0.4% of the nation's non-English speakers — a sign that Iowa had a disproportionately smaller share of non-English households.
The non-English languages most concentrated in Iowa were Serbo-Croatian (3.3% of all US speakers), Swahili or other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa (3.0%), and Thai, Lao, or other Tai-Kadai languages (2.2%).
In Iowa, no non-English language had its largest US-speaking population in the state. Serbo-Croatian was the language for which Iowa accounted for the largest share of US speakers, at 3.3%.
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Serbo-Croatian is the language for which Iowa makes up the largest share of US speakers
State share of national speakers by language, ages 5 and older (2024)
Population change
The US population gained 1.78 million people between 2024 and 2025.
Between 2018 and 2024, the number of people in Iowa whose primary language at home is not English increased 13.0%. The number of people speaking Spanish — the largest of the Census Bureau's four broad language categories in Iowa — grew 19.5% during this period.
In Iowa, the number of people speaking Spanish at home grew 19.5% since 2018
Non-English language speakers ages 5 and older at home, by broad language group
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Methodology
USAFacts standardizes data, in areas such as time and demographics, to make it easier to understand and compare.
Page sources
USAFacts endeavors to share the most up-to-date information available. We sourced the data on this page directly from government agencies; however, the intervals at which agencies publish updated data vary.
