This Is the State People Are Leaving Fast

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 11, 6:40AM EST

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This Is the State People Are Leaving Fast — © Ryan Herron / E+ via Getty Images

There was a great migration from early in the COVID-19 pandemic throughout 2021 into 2022. People moved from expensive coastal states to places inland like Arizona and Florida. Housing was less expensive in these states, and some people liked the lifestyles and weather better than in places such as California and New York. (These cities attracted the most new residents last year.)

The migration was slowed by higher mortgage rates, which have cooled the rate at which people could buy new homes, but the move has not ended. According to a new study about net migration by moving service provider Hire A Helper, California had the highest number of people who moved from a state versus those who moved in. The data for “The Top 10 States and Cities of 2023: 2023-24 HireAHelper Migration Report” came from 75,000 “moves book” and Census Bureau data.

The net loss of people who left California was −44%, followed by New Jersey’s −42%. This matches data from the Census Bureau. California lost 75,423 residents, according to the bureau’s 2023 vintage population estimates, which was the most among all states. This reversed a multidecade trend of people moving to California from places like the Midwest and Northeast.

Among the things that make California unattractive is the cost of living. A study on affordability by state from the World Population Review puts California as third among the most expensive states, just behind Hawaii and Massachusetts.

California also has some of the most expensive cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

These are the states people are migrating from the fastest:

California (−43.7%)
New Jersey (−41.6%)
Louisiana (−31.1%)
Illinois (−30.0%)
New Mexico (−18.9%)
Virginia (−16.8%)
Connecticut (−15.8%)
Maryland (−15.3%)
New York (−13.9%)
Nevada (−5.6%)

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.