Texas leads U.S. in supplying new residents to nine states, Census says

Texas supplied the most new residents of any U.S. state for nine other states, according to figures released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau’s 2024 state-to-state migration flows track where someone lived in the previous year and where they currently live. Based on those flows, Texas was the top source of new residents for Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Texas, which has 31 million residents and ranks second among U.S. states in population, gained 2.1 million people between 2020 and 2024. The AP report said the scale of Texas’ population growth is one reason its out-migration and in-migration volumes are so large.

Dudley Poston, professor emeritus of sociology at Texas A&M University, said, “The obvious and primary answer is size,” adding that “There’s got to be more people leaving Texas than leaving other states because of the population size of Texas.”

Other large producers of residents who moved to other states included California, Florida and New York. California, the most populous U.S. state with 39 million residents, supplied the most new residents to Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Texas and Washington, the Census data showed. The AP report said California also was the top supplier of domestic residents to Tennessee, where Nashville is connected to Southern California’s entertainment industry.

Florida, the third most populous state with 23 million residents, dominated the number of new residents in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina and also in Ohio. The AP report said Florida has gained 1.8 million residents this decade, the second most of any state, and that while state size played a primary role, other factors may be involved as well.

Those other factors, according to the AP report, included Florida’s escalating real estate and homeowners’ insurance prices and more plentiful job opportunities for recent college graduates in places such as Atlanta and Charlotte. Richard Doty, a research demographer at the University of Florida, said in an email, “It is no longer as affordable a relocation/ retirement option as it once was.”

New York was the top source of new residents in Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts and New Jersey, while Illinois provided the most new residents for Midwestern neighbors Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin, according to the Census Bureau flows cited by AP.

Helen You, interim director of the Texas Demographic Center, said in a statement, “The states with the largest out-migration numbers — California, Florida, Texas, and New York — are also the states with the largest populations. That’s not a coincidence,” and added, “Large populations naturally generate large volumes of both in-and-out migrants.”

The AP report said some patterns were familiar, including former Massachusetts residents being the biggest source of new residents in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont; former Wisconsinites making up the largest number of new Minnesotans; and former North Carolinians providing the biggest source of new residents in South Carolina.

In most states in 2024, before the immigration crackdown of the second Trump administration, people arriving from a foreign country were the top source of new residents, AP said. Among the exceptions, where international migration was not large compared with people moving from individual U.S. states, were Idaho, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

The Census Bureau is releasing new population estimates next week that will show how the U.S. changed in 2025.