Where Are People Moving in 2026?

What “where people are moving” really tells you

Migration is the quiet force underneath almost every housing story. Prices, rents, construction, school enrollment, and local tax bases all bend, eventually, toward where people choose to live. When a county adds residents faster than it can add homes, prices and rents tend to climb. When a county loses residents year after year, even attractive listings can sit, and landlords lose pricing power. That is why the question “where are people moving?” is one of the most useful things an investor, a relocating family, or a local official can ask, and why we built this hub on top of the most complete public migration record available.

Plenty of articles answer that question with a single moving-company press release or a one-year Census survey estimate. Those sources are directional at best. A van line only sees its own customers; a survey estimate carries wide error bars at the county level. The IRS county-to-county file, by contrast, is built from actual tax returns. It counts the households and the people that filed from a new county versus the year before, for every pair of counties in the country. It is not a sample, it is close to a census of movers, and it is the same data government demographers lean on when they study domestic migration.

How we rank the markets

For the leaderboards above we take the latest IRS tax year we have loaded and, for every county, total the returns that moved in (inflow) and the returns that moved out (outflow). The “gaining residents” list ranks counties by total inflow, and the “losing residents” list ranks them by total outflow. On each county page we also show the net figure, inflow minus outflow, which is the cleanest single read of whether a market is growing or shrinking through migration. A county can post a large inflow and a large outflow at the same time. Big, high-turnover metros often do, which is exactly why net migration matters more than either gross number on its own.

We deliberately keep the methodology simple and transparent. There is no black-box model on this page, just the raw IRS counts rolled up to the county level, with the agency’s own aggregate and foreign pseudo-rows filtered out so they do not distort a county’s real flows. Because the underlying file is released roughly two years after the tax year it describes, every list and county page is labeled with the tax year it reflects. That lag is a property of the data, not a bug. There is no faster public source that is anywhere near as complete.

Why migration matters for housing and investing

For a real estate investor, migration is a leading indicator of demand. A county that consistently nets new residents has a growing pool of renters and buyers, which supports occupancy, rent growth, and resale liquidity over a multi-year hold. That is the demand side of the equation that pure yield screens miss: a high cap rate in a county that is steadily losing people is a very different bet than the same cap rate in a county people are flocking to. The strongest setups pair healthy net inflows with a housing-supply pipeline that cannot fully keep up, because that gap is what pushes rents and values higher.

For a family deciding where to live, migration patterns are a useful sanity check on the harder-to-measure stuff: job opportunities, cost of living, climate, taxes, and quality of life. People vote with their moving trucks. A sustained inflow usually means a county is delivering something, whether that is jobs, affordability, space, or lifestyle, that is pulling people in from elsewhere. A sustained outflow is worth understanding before you commit, even if the immediate cause, say high housing costs in an otherwise desirable place, might not bother you personally.

Migration also reshapes a place over time in ways that compound. Where the new arrivals come from, and how much income they bring with them, changes a county’s tax base, its retail and service economy, and its politics. The IRS file captures the adjusted gross income that moves along with people, so a county pulling in higher-income households is gaining spending power, not just headcount. The per-county pages surface the top origins and destinations so you can see not just how many people are moving, but the specific places they are coming from and going to.

Reading inflow, outflow, and net together

The three numbers tell different parts of the story. Inflow alone rewards large and popular counties, since more people will always move into a big metro than a small rural county in absolute terms. Outflow alone does the same in reverse. Net migration normalizes for that to a degree by subtracting one from the other, surfacing the places that are genuinely growing or shrinking on balance. A booming exurb might show a modest inflow but almost no outflow, producing a strong net gain that a raw inflow ranking would bury beneath the giant metros. Conversely, an expensive coastal county can post enormous inflow and still bleed residents on net, because even more people are leaving. Always read the net figure alongside the gross flows.

One more nuance worth keeping in mind: migration is sticky but not destiny. A county that gained heavily during a remote-work surge can normalize as conditions change, and an affordability advantage can erode once enough newcomers bid up local prices. That is why we present migration as a multi-year series on each county page rather than a single snapshot, and why we encourage reading it next to forward-looking signals like the price forecast, building permits, and the affordability index rather than in isolation.

Go deeper on any market

Pick any county from the lists above to see its full migration breakdown, then open the county dashboard for prices, the 12-month forecast, crash risk, and cap rate. If you are screening for cash flow, pair what you learn here with the best cash-flow markets ranking and the affordability index, then run any specific listing through Curb Check for instant investor math. Migration tells you where demand is heading; those tools tell you whether a given deal in that market actually pencils out.