Companies Are Moving to Florida

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 20, 7:30AM EDT

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Companies Are Moving to Florida — © mihtiander / iStock via Getty Images

A great deal has been made about the relocation of millions of Americans since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people moved because they could work from home. Others moved because they wanted to live in less expensive cities compared to those they left. Still others moved for lifestyle reasons. Less well understood is the movement of entire companies. These movements showed that certain states were the target of corporation migration. None benefited more than Florida. (These are the best states for science and technology.)

Florida has been a popular place for individual relocation. This has been particularly true for the Miami and Tampa metros. One effect is that housing prices in these cities have soared, according to the S&P Case-Shiller home price index. This, in turn, has made living in those cities more expensive than two years ago.

Hire A Helper’s “2023 Study: Corporate Relocation at Highest Rate Since 2017” report showed that about 9% of American companies have changed their headquarters locations since the start of 2022. About one-fifth of relocations were within the same city. About a third moved to another city within the state where they were previously located.

Financial Statement Data Sets, which are published by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, were the source of most of the data for the study. The yardstick used was a change based on the term “business address.”
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The study’s primary conclusion about state relocations was that “Florida had 86% more corporations move their HQ there, compared to the number of companies that chose to move their head office out of Florida — the highest net gain of any state.”
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Florida’s net migration of business migrations was followed by Texas at plus 71%, Arizona at 65% and Utah at 57%. These figures are close to those of individual migration.
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These are the 10 states with the most net migration of business headquarters:

Florida (85.7%)
Texas (70.6%)
Arizona (65.0%)
Utah (57.1%)
Louisiana (50.0%)
Pennsylvania (50.0%)
Wisconsin (50.0%)
Wyoming (50.0%)
North Carolina (42.9%)
Virginia (42.9%)

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.