State-to-state moves: who gains from whom

The IRS publishes state-to-state files alongside the county ones. Their threshold is lower, 10 returns instead of 20, so nearly every pair of states is listed. The counts below are returns, roughly households, that filed in one state in 2022 and in another in 2023. In all, 27 of the 51 states, counting the District of Columbia, gained more returns from other states than they lost.

Gross flows run both ways

The list of gross flows is full of pairs. New York sends 43,699 returns to New Jersey and receives a large flow back; Florida and Georgia trade tens of thousands of returns in each direction. Big neighboring states tend to exchange large numbers of households, whatever their net balance. That is why the gross list alone says little about which state is gaining.

Net balances

Netting the two directions changes the picture. New York to Florida comes first, then California to Texas at 19,447 returns, and New York to New Jersey third. California appears as the sending state in 6 of the ten largest net transfers, spread across Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Tennessee and Oregon.

Rates

Counting returns favors big states. Measured per 1,000 returns filed in the state, South Carolina had the highest net rate in 2022–23 at +14.0, ahead of Delaware and North Carolina. New York had the lowest at −8.4, with California and Louisiana just above it.

1. South Carolina+14.0
2. Delaware+9.5
3. North Carolina+9.3
4. Tennessee+8.6
5. Idaho+7.7
6. Nevada+6.7
7. Montana+6.5
8. Arizona+6.0
9. Florida+5.9
10. Maine+5.9

The ten highest rates are mostly in the Southeast and the Mountain West. Delaware and Maine, two small states, also make the list; a ranking by returns would hide them.

Who kept gaining

Over the four filing pairs on this site, 23 states gained returns from other states every time, among them Florida, Texas, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Arizona, and 19 lost every time, including California, New York and Illinois. The rest changed direction at least once, usually with a balance close to zero.

Households and people

Returns are households; the files also count the people on them. The 44,417 returns that moved from California to Texas listed 82,481 people. Households leaving California and New York were larger on average than those arriving: 1.67 people per departing return in California against 1.54 per arriving one, and 1.61 against 1.40 in New York. Counted in people, their net losses are therefore larger than the return counts suggest.

Moves abroad

The state totals on this site count moves between states only. The files also record returns that moved between a state and a foreign address, a US territory or a military post office. California sent 15,202 returns abroad in 2022–23 and received 9,394; New York sent 8,748 and received 4,748. Florida came out close to even, with 9,182 in and 9,629 out. These flows are included in the county totals but kept out of the state-to-state balance.

Returns rank differently

Counted in returns rather than as a rate, the order at the top changes. Texas had the largest net gain from other states in 2022–23, 56,473 returns, just ahead of Florida at 55,349 and well ahead of North Carolina at 39,118. South Carolina, first by rate, is fourth by returns. At the other end, California’s net loss of 100,397 returns is the largest by a wide margin, followed by New York at 71,987 and Illinois at 28,609.

Both views are useful. A rate tells how strongly moving reshapes a state relative to its size; a count tells how many households changed address. A small state can lead on the first and barely register on the second, which is why every state page shows both.

Within-state moves are left out

A state-to-state balance ignores the many moves between counties of the same state. In Texas alone, 569,431 returns moved between Texas counties in 2022–23, far more than the state’s net gain from the rest of the country. The county profiles include both kinds of move; the state pages show only the moves that cross the state line, plus a county-by-county list of net rates.

A short list of caveats

The counts cover tax filers only, and the address on a return is a mailing address. A household that keeps a mailing address in its old state may not show up as moving at all. For 2022–23 the IRS also changed its matching method, adding about 5% to the returns counted, which makes small changes from earlier years hard to interpret.

The state overview maps all 51 net rates, and each state page lists its exchange with every other state, sorted from the largest net gain to the largest net loss.

Sources

IRS Statistics of Income, SOI Tax Stats – Migration Data, county-to-county and state-to-state files, 2019–20 to 2022–23 (irs.gov). County locations: US Census Bureau, 2023 Gazetteer Files. Calculations by countymoves; definitions in How to read the data.