With declining births and slower immigration following the Trump administration’s strict deportation policies, domestic migration is bound to become an increasingly more important driver of U.S. population change, a recent study found.

Florida and Texas, which have both been among the fastest-growing states in the nation for years, know what a positive impact a booming population can have on the local economy and job market, as well as what happens when this demographic explosion starts to wane.

This year’s State of the Nation’s Housing report, released earlier this week by the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) of Harvard University, found that the movement of Americans across the country has declined in 2024 all across the country, including in the states that are traditionally the most popular among movers.

Last year, according to researchers, the nation reported the lowest rates of household mobility on record since the 1970s.

Fewer Americans Are Moving Across the Country

According to the latest Current Population Survey, about 8.3 percent of households (10.9 million) reported moving over the past year, a rate unchanged from a year earlier and down from 9.8 percent (12.6 million) before the pandemic, in 2019.

In the same year, the homeowner mobility rate dropped to an all-time low of 3.1 percent, down from 3.7 percent in 2023 and 4.3 percent in 2019. That means U.S. homeowners made 24 percent fewer moves last year than in 2019, before the pandemic unleashed a surge of remote workers relocating from large, busy metropolises to smaller, more affordable towns.

The South was the main beneficiary of this influx of people relocating to cheaper, more livable parts of the nation, with Florida and Texas adding hundreds of thousands of new residents over the past five years.

The rate of domestic migration in Florida increased from 6.5 in 2019 to 8.1 in 2020, 11.4 in 2021, and reached a peak of 14.2 in 2022. In 2023, it fell to 8.2, and in 2024, it plunged to 2.7.

In Texas, the rate increased from 4.2 in 2019 to 5.6 in 2020, 6.7 in 2021, 7.4 in 2022, and 6.3 in 2023, only to fall to 2.8 in 2024.

While domestic migration remained the main source of population growth last year for 11 states, primarily in the South, net gains from migration fell in several of these states. In North Carolina, domestic migration decreased by 17 percent from the previous year, while in Tennessee, it decreased by 20 percent.

Not only has in-migration—the process of relocating permanently to another part of one’s home country—slowed down in the states that were most benefiting from it over the past five years, but out-migration from states that were hemorrhaging residents also slowed down last year.

The number of residents moving out of California, for example, dropped by 30 percent in 2024, from −344,000 in 2023 to −240,000 in 2024.

New York, another state where out-migration has surpassed in-migration in recent years, lost 121,000 people on net to interstate migration in 2024, about 30 percent fewer than in 2023 (−177,000) and 60 percent fewer than in 2022 (−296,000).

Why Is Domestic Migration Declining?

Since 2019, the cost of homeownership has skyrocketed nationwide, including in states that previously offered more affordable options. The median sale price of a typical U.S. home was $313,000 in the first quarter of 2019, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau; in the first quarter of 2024, it had surged to $426,800. As of the first quarter of 2025, $416,900.

Mortgage rates have also gone through the roof since 2019. If historically low monthly payments during the pandemic spurred a homebuying frenzy nationwide, rates lingering around the 7 percent mark are now hindering demand, pushing buyers to the sidelines.

The result is that packing up and moving to another state has become a trickier operation for many Americans, considering the overall cost of purchasing a new property. On top of that, return-to-office orders from companies that had been pressured to offer remote working options during the pandemic are now forcing many employees to go back to the same busy metros they had left.

According to the JCHS study, last year there was a slowdown in moves out of urban centers across the U.S., which had accelerated during the pandemic. Net moves from dense urban counties, such as those in New York City, researchers found, fell for the third consecutive year in 2024, down 17 percent from the previous year.

At the same time, net moves into suburban counties fell 16 percent year-over-year, while gains in smaller metros and non-metro counties declined by 12 percent and 31 percent, respectively, over the past year; however, these remain higher than pre-pandemic levels.