In tax year 2023–2024, California sent 27,400 federal tax filers to Texas. Texas sent 8,200 back. The 19,200-filer net flow is the largest single state-to-state directed move in the IRS migration file, and it has held the top spot for four straight years. The map below collapses the county file into a state net-migration rate so gains and losses can be read directly from the map.
The IRS data has a specific virtue most migration sources lack: it follows the same households across two consecutive years using their tax returns, which means the moves are individual-level matched, not estimated from cross-sectional surveys. The cost is that it only counts tax filers, so children, retirees on Social Security alone, and anyone below the filing threshold are invisible. Used carefully, it is still the cleanest count of household-level interstate moves the federal government produces.
The headline directed pairs are the ones you’d guess. California to Texas. New York to Florida. Illinois to Florida. New Jersey to Florida. California to Arizona. Florida to Tennessee is the surprise inclusion, driven almost entirely by the Tampa-to-Nashville corridor. The reverse flows are smaller in every case but not zero. The state-rate view keeps that net effect visible: green states gained filers relative to their base, red states lost them.
The state choropleth tells a cleaner story than a county-level shade field. County detail is real, but at national scale it turns into texture before it turns into information. The map most people carry of “people are moving to red states” is not exactly wrong, but it conceals a more specific pattern: people are moving toward lower-cost metro edges in Florida, Texas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arizona, and parts of the Mountain West.
Methodology
The state-to-state flow file comes from the IRS Statistics of Income County-to-County Migration Data file for tax year 2023–2024 (the freshest available at publication). Net flow = inflows minus outflows, aggregated to the state level, with cells under 20 returns suppressed per IRS disclosure rules. We convert the net count to a state rate for the map. ACS Migration Flows from the May 14, 2026 update are referenced for cross-validation only.
Caveats
- IRS migration data counts tax filers, not people. Children, non-filers, and many retirees are not represented. Use this as household-flow data, not population-flow data.
- Cells with fewer than 20 returns are suppressed and rendered as “n/a” rather than zero. The source pill reports the suppressed-cell count.
- The reference period spans calendar 2023 into 2024 and lags any 2025–2026 migration shifts, including the post-rate-cut housing-market changes.