Where the rich move

1. $200,000-plus filers, every state, 2011–2023

The IRS matches each year’s tax returns with the year before to see who moved. This shows the net rate at which filers with $200,000 or more of income arrived in or left each state. Each bar is one year’s correlation, across the states, between that rate and the state’s income-tax burden. (The burden is how much state and local income tax takes as a share of income. A correlation shows how closely two measures rise and fall together, from −1, opposite, to +1, in step. Zero means no link.) It is negative in every year, between −0.27 and −0.50, with no trend. So states with heavier income taxes tend to see more of these filers leave, on net. What changed is the size. The net outflow per point of tax burden roughly doubled in 2020–21 and has since fallen back to its earlier level. Paler bars are years before 2017–18, when IRS processing changes moved every state’s totals together. Read them as comparisons across states, not against later years.

2. Income moving to lower-tax states

This uses every pair of states in the IRS counts of moves from one state to another. It compares households moving to a state whose income-tax burden is at least half a percentage point lower with those moving to one at least half a point higher. Every year, more move down than up, and those moving down have higher incomes.

Adjusted gross income (income as reported on the tax return) per household, in current dollars. * Before the IRS processing changes, so compare only within the row.

3. Millionaires, by where they file

IRS counts of tax returns reporting $1 million or more of income, by state. These count residents, not movers. A state’s count rises when millionaires arrive, and also when residents have a good year in the stock market. The IRS state tables stop at $200,000 for 2002–2009, so there is no count for those years.

4. New York’s own returns, $500,000 and over

Filers who moved into or out of New York, from the state’s tax returns (via the State Comptroller). No other public source reports moves at incomes this high, though this covers only one state.

5. Households over $500,000, between states

The only public counts of moves above $200,000 come from the Census American Community Survey, a large yearly survey of households. We use its individual answers for households with $500,000 or more of income (2023dollars) that lived in another state a year earlier. Samples are small, so several years are grouped together. Every figure has a 90% margin of error, shown after the ± sign. It gives the likely range: the true figure is probably within that much of the number shown. The Census works out these margins with a standard method called replicate weights. Where the margin is larger than the figure, the state’s net flow could easily be zero. Before use, each year’s survey count of these households in the ten largest states is checked against the IRS count of returns over $500,000 there. From 2021 they agree to within about 20%. But in 2017–2019 the survey counted Florida’s at only 57–73% of the level the IRS returns imply, measured against other large states. So those years are left out.

6. What confidential tax records show

Two studies used private tax records: the IRS’s and California’s returns for individual people. No public source matches them. The first followed every American with $1 million or more of income from 1999 to 2011. Millionaires moved between states less often than people in general. There was a measurable drift towards lower-tax states, above all Florida. But it was small next to the number of millionaires who stayed put (Young, Varner, Lurie & Prisinzano, 2016). The second looked at California, which raised its top rates by up to three percentage points in 2012. After that, more of its highest earners left, mostly for states without an income tax. Together with those who stayed and reported less income, they gave back a substantial part of the extra tax money expected (Rauh & Shyu, 2024). Forbes tracks which states billionaires live in, but its lists cannot be republished here.

What this can and cannot say

• Association only. Low-tax states are also warmer, cheaper and growing, and people move for all of these reasons at once. None of these figures separates the tax from the rest.
• Levels, not changes. High-tax states lose high earners year after year. Whether they lose more after raising taxes is a different question, and the answer so far is no measurable extra outflow.
• Nothing public reaches the top.The IRS migration data stops at $200,000. New York’s goes to $500,000, but for one state only. The Census survey reaches few households above $1 million.