Each year, Americans pick up and move to a new state largely because they land a new job or transfer to a different office. But demographic shifts are also causing people to pack their bags. United Van Lines, a large, St. Louis-based moving company that managed 114,000 moves last year, recently released data on U.S. migration patterns. It looked at how many people left a state as a proportion of the total moves in that state, and then created this ranking.
For the top 10 states people are fleeing, open the gallery below.
New Jersey, Illinois, New York and Connecticut were the top states where more people are departing than arriving. An aging population is partly driving this trend, according to Michael Stoll, an economist and public policy professor at UCLA who partners with United Van Lines to interpret the migration study. “Compared to the South and West, the Midwest and Northeast have older populations,” he says. “As baby boomers reach retirement age, they’re thinking about places that have the amenities they’re looking for: warmer, more temperate climates and lower cost of living.”
If you live in New York City, the state's exodus might be puzzling. Population across the five boroughs grew nearly 5% from 2010 to 2015, but Stoll says people are leaving the areas outside of the City in larger numbers.
Ohio also made the list of states people are leaving. Although Cleveland, its second largest city, is growing, “as a state overall, Ohio is aging, and it’s not generating the employment that some other states are,” says Stoll. People are also looking for warmer climates.
So where are people going? Mostly out West and down South. Some of the states with the largest proportions of inbound moves were Oregon, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota and Vermont.
While many of the moves to the South and West were driven by retirement and lifestyle decisions, South Dakota is an anomaly. It’s a small state—United Van Lines only conducted 504 of its 114,000 moves there in 2016—but most of the inbound moves were driven by people starting new jobs, according to survey data from United Van Lines. Stoll says that, while the oil and gas industries have declined, financial services and agricultural mining have flourished. Vermont is also an exception. Unlike other northeastern states, it has a high portion of people (20%) moving there to pursue a different lifestyle.
