Where America's Income Is Moving

Explore your state or county. Search for a place, or click one on the map.

Income means adjusted gross income (AGI) reported by the filers who moved. It is not wealth carried across a border or tax revenue gained or lost, and because it was reported after the move, some or all of it may have been earned in the place the filer left. How to read the numbers

01Where People Go, and Where the Income Goes

The places that receive the most movers are not always the places that receive the most income. The two lists below rank the same routes two ways. Hover over a row to find its route on the map.

02Compare Both Directions

Every route runs both ways. Pick two states to see how many filers moved each way, and what they reported.

03Are Arrivals Reporting More Income Than Departures?

A place can lose more filers than it gains and still come out ahead on income, if the people arriving report more. These are averages: total reported income divided by the number of returns. They are not medians or typical household incomes, and a small number of very large incomes can move an average a long way.

04County Moves: Nearby or Across State Lines

A county can lose filers to its neighbors while drawing filers from other states. Pick a county to split its moves into those that stayed in the same state and those that crossed a state line. These are counties and county equivalents (parishes, boroughs, independent cities), not cities.

05Four Patterns

Each dot is a place. Across: the net number of returns it gained or lost. Up and down: the net reported income. Most places sit where you would expect, gaining both or losing both. The two mixed corners are the interesting ones: places that gained filers but lost income, and places that lost filers but gained income.

06History

07Age and Income of the Movers

08Findings in the Latest Data

These are worked out by the page from the latest IRS period every time it loads, not written by hand. Each one is a starting point: click through to see the place behind it.

• Working out the findings...

09Fact Sheet, Data and Citation

Everything on the page can be taken with you. The fact sheet is a one-page summary of the place you have selected, ready to print or save as a PDF.

All 50 States and D.C., 2022-23

Moves between states only. Moves abroad and moves between counties in the same state are left out. Income is total adjusted gross income. Click a column to sort.

10How to Read the Numbers

Where the data comes from

The IRS Statistics of Income division matches each individual income tax return to the same filer's return from the year before. When the address moves to a different county or state, the return counts as a move. A period such as 2022-23 compares returns filed in 2022 with returns filed in 2023. The 2023 returns mostly report income earned in 2022, so the move happened at some point before that return was filed, not on a known date.

What is being counted

• Returns roughly stand for households: one return can cover a married couple and their dependents.
• Individuals are the people claimed on those returns (filers plus dependents), which approximates the people who moved. They are not separately tracked movers.
• Income is adjusted gross income from the second-year return, which the IRS publishes in thousands of dollars. It can be negative when a return reports a loss.
• Average income is total reported income divided by the number of returns. Net figures are incoming minus outgoing.

What it does not tell you

• Why anyone moved. The data records an address change and nothing else.
• That the income moved. Income on the second return was reported after the move, and may have been earned partly or wholly in the old state.
• Everyone who moved. People who do not file a return, and returns that cannot be matched from one year to the next, are left out.
• An exact address. The address on a return is a mailing address, which may differ from where the filer lives.

Gaps, privacy rules and the published totals

To protect taxpayers, the IRS removes state-to-state routes with fewer than 10 returns and county-to-county routes with fewer than 20, and leaves a return out of a cell when that one return would make up too large a share of it. Small county routes are pooled into "other flows" groups (same state, different state, by region, and foreign). This page lists the same-state and different-state groups as the IRS published them, gives the regional split in the table caption, and counts the foreign groups only in the moves-abroad totals. It marks removed values as not published. It never turns a missing value into a zero, and it takes every total from the IRS's own total rows rather than adding up the routes it can see, because the visible routes do not always add up to the total.

Moves abroad

The IRS also counts moves to and from foreign addresses, military APO and FPO addresses and U.S. territories. They are shown separately and left out of the domestic figures, which are the default everywhere on the page.

Comparing years

The IRS changed its matching method starting with the 2022-23 data, which it says adds about 5 percent more returns than the old method would have, and it treats that release as the start of a new series. Earlier, the IRS added a warning with the 2014-15 release that changes in how it processes returns, made to fight identity theft, can affect the data. National totals for 2014-15 and 2016-17 are far below and above the years around them. The history chart marks all three points, and the page does not label any year a record. Dollar figures are not adjusted for inflation.

The age and income tables

The IRS's separate gross migration table breaks state moves down by the age of the primary taxpayer and by income. It counts moves to and from abroad, leaves out returns with negative income, and folds groups with fewer than 10 returns into another income group for the same age group, so its totals differ slightly from the rest of the page. It is published for states only.

Revision history

• October 25, 2026: First published with IRS data through 2022-23.

11Sources

• Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income: SOI Tax Stats - Migration Data, state-to-state files for 2011-12 through 2022-23, county-to-county files for 2021-22 and 2022-23, and the gross migration tables by age and income.
• Internal Revenue Service: Migration Data Users Guide and Record Layouts, 2022-23.
• Map shapes: U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundaries, via the us-atlas project. Connecticut's planning regions, which replaced its counties in the IRS files, are not drawn as shapes. Their routes start and end at the center of each region. Alaska's Chugach and Copper River census areas, which replaced Valdez-Cordova in 2019, are handled the same way and are blank on the county map.