Oregon just did something it has never done before in the nearly five-decade history of United Van Lines’ annual movers study: it became the single most popular destination in the country, with 65% of all moves involving the state last year being people arriving rather than leaving, according to the mover’s 49th annual National Movers Study. Texas, for its part, reclaimed the top spot in U-Haul’s own migration index, a ranking built from more than two million one-way truck, trailer, and U-Box moves the company tracks every year, as detailed in U-Haul’s 2025 Growth Index. And fresh U.S. Census Bureau estimates show the country’s overall growth rate slowed to just 0.5% between mid-2024 and mid-2025, the weakest pace since the early pandemic years, even as individual states and metro areas posted some of the sharpest gains and losses in years, per the Bureau’s newest population estimates. If you’ve had a hunch that people really are leaving expensive coastal cities for the Carolinas, Texas, and Florida, the data finally backs that up in black and white. And if you’re one of the many people quietly weighing a move yourself, whether that’s a downsize, a retirement relocation, or just a search for a gentler cost of living, this year’s numbers give you an unusually detailed map of where everyone else is headed and why they’re going.
The States Everyone’s Moving To
According to United Van Lines, the top inbound states for 2025 were Oregon, West Virginia, and South Carolina, with Oregon at 65% inbound moves and West Virginia and South Carolina close behind at 62% and 61%, followed by Delaware, Minnesota, Idaho, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, and Nevada rounding out the top ten (United Van Lines). “The data reveals Americans are seeking a different pace of life, and destinations like Oregon, the Carolinas and the south are delivering it,” said Eily Cummings, the company’s vice president of corporate communications, in the study’s official release.
The Census Bureau’s raw population counts tell a related but slightly different story, since they measure actual net growth rather than the share of a moving company’s business. By that measure, Texas added the most people of any state in the country, growing by 391,243 residents, followed by Florida at 196,680 and North Carolina at 145,907, while South Carolina posted the highest percentage growth in the nation at 1.5%, with Idaho at 1.4% and North Carolina at 1.3% close behind (U.S. Census Bureau). It’s worth sitting with that distinction for a moment. A state like West Virginia can rank near the top of a mover’s inbound list because a large share of the (relatively small) number of people moving there are arriving rather than leaving, even as its total population continues to shrink. If you’re using migration rankings to size up a place, it genuinely matters whether you’re looking at momentum or raw scale.
The States People Are Leaving
On the outbound side, United Van Lines found New Jersey topped the list at 62% outbound moves, followed by New York at 58% and California also at 58%, with North Dakota, Colorado, Mississippi, and Massachusetts rounding out the states people were most likely to be leaving rather than joining (United Van Lines). U-Haul’s index, which tracks the direction of one-way equipment rentals rather than survey responses, landed on a similar bottom five: California finished last for the sixth consecutive year, with Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts filling out the rest of the bottom of the ranking (U-Haul). The Census Bureau’s own count of states that actually lost population in the past year names California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont, and West Virginia (U.S. Census Bureau).
It would be easy to read all of that as a simple story about people fleeing high taxes or expensive housing, and cost is certainly part of it, but U-Haul’s own leadership is careful not to oversimplify. J.T. Taylor, the company’s president, put it plainly: “Life circumstances, marriage, children, a death in the family, college, jobs and other events, dictate the need for most moves,” according to the company’s official growth index release. In other words, plenty of people leaving New York or New Jersey aren’t making a political statement. They’re chasing a job, following family, or simply ready for a change of scenery, and it happens to land them somewhere warmer and less expensive along the way.
The Real Action Is in the Suburbs and Smaller Metros
If you zoom in from states to metro areas, the picture gets even more interesting, and a little more specific in a way that’s genuinely useful if you’re house-hunting. In raw numbers, Houston led every metro in the country with 126,720 new residents, followed closely by Dallas-Fort Worth at 123,557, then Atlanta at 61,953, Phoenix at 59,065, and Charlotte at 54,122 (U.S. Census Bureau). But when you look at percentage growth rather than raw headcount, a very different, much smaller cast of characters shows up on top: Ocala, Florida led the nation at 3.4% growth, followed by Myrtle Beach, South Carolina at 3.2%, Spartanburg, South Carolina at 2.8%, and Lakeland and Punta Gorda in Florida tied at 2.7% each, per the same Bureau release. These aren’t the cities most people would have named a decade ago, and that’s precisely the point: growth is increasingly happening in mid-sized, lower-cost metros rather than the usual big-name destinations.
United Van Lines’ metro-level breakdown backs this up from the moving-truck side, with Eugene-Springfield, Oregon at 85% inbound, Wilmington, North Carolina at 83%, and Dover, Delaware at 79% topping its list of metros people are flocking to, while Hagerstown, Maryland, the Nassau-Suffolk area of New York, and Pueblo, Colorado ranked among the metros people were most eager to leave (United Van Lines). Meanwhile, some of the country’s biggest, priciest metros kept losing residents even as their states technically grew. Los Angeles County alone lost 53,934 people, more than any other county in the nation, and several big-city counties in and around New York saw similar losses (U.S. Census Bureau). Census demographer George M. Hayward pointed to a big reason why: with international migration slowing dramatically, “these types of counties saw their population growth diminish or even turn into loss,” since they’d been relying heavily on international arrivals to offset residents moving elsewhere domestically.
What’s Actually Driving These Moves
When United Van Lines asked people why they were relocating, the top answer, by a wide margin, was proximity to family at 29%, followed by a new job or company transfer at 26%, and retirement at 14% (United Van Lines). Notice what’s missing from the top of that list: politics, weather, and even housing costs directly, though all three almost certainly shape which specific family, job, or retirement destination people choose once they’ve decided to move. Remote and hybrid work flexibility has quietly become the thing that lets a job-related move happen anywhere rather than tying someone to a single metro, which helps explain why growth is spreading into smaller, cheaper cities instead of concentrating in the handful of traditional job hubs the way it used to.
The retirement piece deserves its own moment, since it’s driving a lot of the traffic into the Carolinas, Tennessee, and parts of Florida and Arizona. Lower property taxes, no state income tax in several of these states, and a genuinely milder climate for people managing joint pain or heart conditions all make a real difference once you’re living on a fixed income. And underneath all of it sits a demographic shift the Census Bureau is watching closely: net international migration into the U.S. dropped from 2.7 million to just 1.3 million people, a decline of more than half, according to the Bureau’s release. “The slowdown in U.S. population growth is largely due to a historic decline in net international migration, which dropped from 2.7 million to 1.3 million,” said Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for Estimates and Projections at the Census Bureau. That drop means domestic migration, meaning Americans moving from one state to another, now carries more weight in determining which places grow and which ones shrink. In fact, 31 states posted positive net domestic migration this year, up from 27 the year before, so more of the country is now gaining residents from within its own borders rather than relying on newcomers from abroad.
If You’re Weighing a Move of Your Own
If any of this has you eyeing a change, whether that’s downsizing out of a house that’s gotten too big, chasing a lower cost of living, or moving closer to grandkids, a few practical things are worth keeping in mind before you book the truck. First, remember that a hot growth metro isn’t automatically a bargain. Places like Ocala, Myrtle Beach, and Punta Gorda are growing precisely because they were affordable, but rapid growth tends to push up home prices, insurance premiums, and rents faster than local wages can keep pace, so do your homework on where prices stand today rather than what you remember reading a couple of years ago. Florida in particular has seen homeowners insurance costs climb sharply as more people move into hurricane-prone areas, so factor that into your monthly budget math, not just the mortgage.
Second, visit in the season you’d actually be living there before you commit, not just during a pleasant spring trip. A lot of these fast-growing Southern towns are gorgeous in March and considerably less charming in August, and you want to know that before your furniture is on a truck. Third, if a job or remote-work flexibility is part of your reasoning, confirm in writing that your arrangement is permanent and portable rather than assuming it will stay that way indefinitely, since return-to-office policies have shifted quickly for plenty of companies. And if you’re downsizing specifically, give yourself more time than feels necessary. Sorting through decades of belongings while also managing a cross-state move is one of the more emotionally taxing things you’ll do, and rushing it tends to create regret about items let go of too quickly.
What this year’s numbers really show, when you put the moving-company data next to the Census Bureau’s counts, is that the old shorthand of “everyone’s moving to Texas and Florida” is only half the story now. The growth is dispersing outward into smaller, more affordable metros that didn’t used to register on anyone’s radar, driven less by a single dramatic motive than by an accumulation of ordinary ones: a job that finally allows flexibility, a retirement account that stretches further somewhere with lower taxes, a family member who needs to be closer, or simply a home that no longer needs to be paid for at coastal prices. Wherever you land in that mix, you’re not chasing a trend so much as joining a very large, very well-documented group of people making the same quiet calculation you are.
