Housing News

The 5 States Attracting the Most New Residents—And the 5 States People Are Leaving

January 27, 2025

America has always been a nation on the move—and lately that move has been to Texas.

The Lone Star State, along with other more affordable states in the South, attracted the most new residents in 2024, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Meanwhile, California and Northeastern states with higher home prices and cost of living lost the most residents last year.

However, the number of folks relocating to new parts of the country has slowed down considerably since the pandemic. Many people relocated during this stretch when they could suddenly work remotely.

"In Texas, a ton of people moved in and home prices went up,” said Lance Lambert, founder of ResiClub, a media and research company that covers the U.S. housing market. “Now the market is going through normalization. But in the long term, there will be demand and the housing market will continue to get bigger."

Why Texas is the top destination for movers

About 85,267 new residents moved into Texas in 2024, according to the Census Bureau.

While the state has high property taxes, it doesn’t have a state income tax and home prices are also reasonable. The median home list price in Texas was $359,500 in December—well below the national median price tag of $402,500, according to Realtor.com data.

While home prices in the state have jumped about 26% over the last five years, they have been coming down since peaking in the summer of 2022.

“Higher mortgage interest rates are stopping people from moving,” said Stephanie Douglass, co-founder of the brokerage Open House Austin. “It’s actually a relief because it was unsustainable.”

Brad Pauly, owner of Austin-based Pauly Presley Realty, said that tech jobs in the city, which is known as Silicon Hills, are a huge motivator.

“It has brought a lot of people from around the country,” he said.

The 5 states with the most new residents:

Texas
North Carolina
South Carolina
Florida
Tennessee

The states the most people are leaving

Not surprisingly, the biggest losers in population were in more expensive states, such as California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Illinois also made the list.

The median home list price in California was $715,000 in December, according to Realtor.com data. The state lost about 239,575 residents in 2024.

The rest of the top five states losing residents all had home prices over the national median of $402,500, except for Illinois. The median price tag in the Prairie State was $292,450 in December.

In the Northeast, which garnered four of the five top spots, has been stymied by the lack of homes on the market. That low inventory coupled with strong demand for housing has kept these housing markets hot, despite the number of residents leaving.

Meanwhile, builders put up so many new homes in Texas and Florida that prices have come down.

“The irony of the data is that those states with decreasing net migration are some of the strongest housing markets,” said Lambert. “[Meanwhile,] Texas and Florida are two of the softest housing markets in the nation.”

The 5 states losing the most residents: