Jobs, Warm Weather and Retirement Destinations Contribute to Domestic Migration Patterns

Patterns of county-level domestic migration — people moving from one county to another — can change significantly over time.

Migration can be sensitive to sometimes sudden external forces, highlighting the importance of analyzing patterns over time and not in isolation.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 disrupted many domestic migration patterns, and migration rates of the top counties dropped significantly that year compared to prior years.

For example, some of last decade’s domestic migration hot spots are no longer attracting as many people, and new migration magnets have surfaced in recent years.

Figure 1 shows how domestic migration rates evolved from 2011 to 2025.

Our analysis examines top domestic migration destinations in five-year spans between 2011 and 2025. We identify some of the potential drivers of change in migration patterns, which range from economic opportunity and retirement enclaves, particularly in areas with warmer weather, to sprawling growth outside of cities.

County domestic migration rates were calculated for each year from July 1 to June 30 based on the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 population estimates released today.

We focus on movement of the household population and exclude the group quarters (GQ) population (such as college dormitories, prisons, and nursing facilities) from our calculation of domestic migration rates due to its volatility — particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, we limit our analysis to counties with populations of at least 20,000 in a given year.

To explain these migration patterns, we analyzed data on age-specific migration from our internal (nonpublic) population estimates. However, similar analyses can be obtained publicly from the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.

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