US Population Migration

📘

Ready to use this data? See the Core LMI reference documentation to get started.

Description

This dataset shows domestic taxpayer migration among all states, MSAs, and counties in the United States. The data goes back to 2012 (2012 tracks migration from 2011-2012) and is updated as available data is released by the IRS, generally lagging by two calendar years.

The source and design of this dataset excludes certain groups of people and thus does not represent the entire population, but rather is a good indicator of migrating workers within the laborforce, based on taxpayers. Specifically, the follow demographics are under-represented:

• Youth (not required to file taxes)
• Elderly (not required to file taxes)
• The poor (not required to file taxes)
• The very wealthy (complicated returns often get extensions and are excluded)
• New filers (excluded because they did not file the previous year)
• Former filers (excluded because they filed in the previous year but not the current year)
• Some joint filers (only the primary taxpayer is included)
• Mistakes (errors on a tax return can cause it to be excluded)

Additionally, on recommendation from the migration expert at the IRS, we multiply the published number of migrations by 0.9 to better approximate the actual number of taxpayers that are moving. Their recommendation is based on the assumption that 90% of exemptions claimed on tax returns actually represent a person, while the remaining 10% do not.

Warning: non-migrants are included in this dataset as datapoints where a county is included in both the OutCounty and InCounty constraints. This means that any summation of counties will likely include some non-migrants. For example, if you want to retrieve the number of migrants from Los Angeles county to the state of California, you will also need to subtract migration from Los Angeles county to itself. Another example, if you want to calculate total outmigration from Washington, DC MSA to any other county, you will also need to subtract any flows between the counties that comprise the MSA itself.

When requesting an MSA code as the area constraint in a query, the code must be prepended by MSA (e.g. for MSA code 10540, use 'MSA10540').

Use Cases

Questions answered by this dataset:

• How many taxpayers moved from Kansas to Texas in 2014?
• How many taxpayers moved among the counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro in 2015?
• Is the trend of taxpayers moving from California to Idaho growing?

Metrics

• Population: Number of taxpayers that moved from OutCounty to InCounty in the given year.

Filters

• OutCounty (Nation, State, MSA, County taxpayers are migrating from)
• InCounty (Nation, State, MSA, County taxpayers are migrating to)
• Year

Core LMI Metadata