Which States Are Most Popular?

With the 19th century completion of a transportation infrastructure that extended from coast to coast and North to South, we could have a national market. Since then, regional specialization meant we produced goods and services in the most appropriate areas.

Still today, people are moving where they can be most productive.

Interstate Migration

While Exxon moved its operations to Texas in 1989, its legal home has been New Jersey since 1882. Now, having received permission from its shareholders, it will reincorporate in Texas.

Exxon is not alone:

The Most Popular States

You can see our lists from The Economist, United, and Atlas are different.

Explaining its moves, United Van Lines said family, jobs, and retirement. Interstate movers wanted to be closer to family, their job relocated, or they retired. As a result, Oregon, as a jobs destination in tech and healthcare was a leading inbound state. By contrast, New Jersey has more people leaving for “retirement, affordability, and lifestyle” reasons than the young professionals that move there.

In the Atlas analysis, they cite less mobility. The reason? Affordability. They remind us that the housing market is challenging with slowing sales constraining interstate migration.

You can see that New Jersey topped the United outbound list while for Atlas, it was Louisiana:

Except for Arkansas, Alabama, and North Carolina, the two major movers do not agree:

However, a closer look at specific state destinations would explain the differences. For example. Walmart was the reason that 38% of all newcomers to Arkansas moved to Bentonville.

Our Bottom Line: Moving Overview

Harvard’s Joint Center For Housing Studies looked at why and where we moved during 2019. While they told us that then, most moves were local, today, up-to-date census data agrees with their conclusions. Consequently, the interstate migration on which we have focused is a much smaller proportion of where we move:

So what is our common denominator? Whichever study we select, interstate moves are typically related to jobs or retiring. By contrast, the local moves are housing motivated.

My sources and more: Thanks to The Economist for inspiring today’s post. From there, we checked United and Atlas for current moving statistics and then Harvard for the academic perspective.