As many of you know, there has been a huge uptick in many people leaving the Golden State for a multitude of reasons. After tallying up our numbers and having a whopping 14 people move to Idaho alone in 2021, the numbers left me wondering where else Californians are ending up settling when they do leave. So I crunched the numbers further, did a little digging and this is what I found.
More than 653,000 Californians moved to another state in 2019, while about 480,000 people moved here from elsewhere in the country, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. (The 2020 numbers aren’t available, but analyses of other 2020 data sets have yielded similar results.)
These were the top destinations for Californians leaving:
Texas (82,235 people in Texas had moved from California in the last year)
Arizona (59,713)
Nevada (47,322)
Washington (46,791)
Oregon (37,927)
States you’d be most likely to run into a Californian:
Nevada (three out of every 200 Nevada residents had moved from California in the past year)
Idaho
Oregon
Arizona
Hawaii
These are the states new Californians most often moved here from:
New York (37,567 Californians had lived in New York in the past year)
Texas (37,063)
Washington (31,882)
Arizona (28,226)
Nevada (26,433)
For many Californians, the high cost of living makes staying here near-impossible. In Texas, the median home price is $329,000, less than half of what it is in California.