(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — In 2022 Texas and Florida each gained a new resident every four and a half minutes, while California lost a resident every two and a half minutes, according to a new report National Taxpayers Union Foundation released Tuesday.
The 2022 data from the IRS on interstate migration by taxpayers represents continued yearly trends: taxpayers are fleeing high-tax states and heading to low-tax ones.
Movements of tens of thousands of Americans in and out of a state can be difficult to conceptualize. NTUF’s Migration in Minutes metric translates migration flows into how often a taxpayer leaves or enters a state.
Texas narrowly beat out Florida for the top spot by gaining a new taxpayer two seconds faster on average. California and New York continued to suffer the largest exodus, losing a taxpayer every 2 minutes and 37 seconds and every 3 minutes and 20 seconds, respectively.
“As states continue to diverge on tax policy, our ‘laboratories of democracy’ are increasingly running noticeably different experiments. IRS migration data is one of the most direct and honest forms of feedback available from taxpayers on what kind of state they want to live in,” said NTUF Director of State Policy and report author Andrew Wilford.
The shift toward low-tax states is nothing new. Between 2013 and 2022, Florida and Texas siphoned 1.6 million and 1.2 million new residents from other states, respectively, while California and New York each lost about 1.8 million residents.
“Since the pandemic, states around the country have been active in making their tax codes more appealing for prospective new residents. States hoping to compete in the migration battles of the latter half of the 2020s should look first and foremost at updating their tax codes to be more competitive with their neighbors,” Wilford said.
