The United States experiences continuous social and economic change over the years and different cycles can have a sizable impact on the movement of people from place to place within the country.

We call this movement across county lines domestic migration. It is widely recognized that people make decisions to move for a variety of reasons, including economic change and job opportunities. These changes are reflected in the population estimates developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. They show that over roughly the last decade, some major domestic migration patterns were disrupted while others remained relatively unaffected.

Every year the Census Bureau releases data on domestic migration for all states, counties and metropolitan/micropolitan statistical areas. While the data are primarily created as inputs to estimate the size of the U.S. population, the data also shed light on mobility patterns and the social and economic conditions that affect them. Here, we break the analysis down into three time points across the last decade: 2005, 2010 and 2015. The goal is to show how much change can occur in domestic migration patterns even within a few years at various levels of geography.

Population estimates show that in 2005, states (Florida and Arizona) that experienced positive net domestic migration (more people moving in than out) had much less gain during 2010 but bounced back by 2015. States that were losing people to other states early in the period (California and New York), stemmed their net migration losses as mobility slowed but then returned to previous levels by the end of the period. Finally, some states (Texas, North Dakota, the District of Columbia and Colorado) continued to experience increasing net domestic migration gains throughout the entire period.

Figure 1 compares the numeric gains in states by using 2005, 2010 and 2015 estimates. The orange dots represent 2009-2010, the period’s midpoint. Green triangles represent early period migration, while the purple squares show recent patterns. Anywhere the orange dot is far from the other two markers indicates where there was a noticeable impact on a state’s domestic migration flows. When the orange dot is between the other two symbols, the impact was relatively less.