The US Census Bureau just released state population data for mid-year 2025, along with updates for all previous years back to the 2020 Census. The Census estimates population growth with data on births, deaths, international migration, and "domestic migration" (among states and territories of the US). I always enjoy looking at the domestic migration data because they tell us a lot about where Americans prefer to live.

Freedom predicts net domestic migration fairly well. A lot of people have been pointing out the fact that Americans tend to move from "blue" to "red" states. The driving factor is not partisanship itself, but the different policies offered to residents of these states. The federal level has long been more complicated, but at the state level, Republican-led states still tend to enact "Reaganite" policies of limited government and free enterprise, while Democrat-led states tend to enact special-interest-oriented regulations and spending programs.

I've also seen a lot of people ranking states by total number of net domestic migrations (interstate moves in or out). Obviously, bigger states are going to dominate the top and bottom end of these rankings. Net domestic migrants over a period, as a percentage of the initial population, is much more useful. To make comparisons across periods of different lengths (as reported data often differ), divide by the number of years to yield an estimated average annual rate of net domestic migration.

Table 1 ranks the top and bottom ten states on average annual net migration rate for the April 2020 to July 2025 period, encompassing virtually all of the pandemic.

Table 1: State Average Annual Net Domestic Migration Rates, 2020–2025

Some of these rates are quite large! New York, for example, is losing fully one percent of its population to other states every year, on average. At the other extreme, Idaho, South Carolina, Montana, and Delaware are growing by more than one percent of their population moving in from other states, on average per year. 

The only Democratic-leaning states in the top 10 are Delaware and Maine, and the only Republican-leaning states in the bottom 10 are Louisiana and Alaska. When we look at these exceptions, unusual levels of freedom stand out. Louisiana is quite low on freedom for its region, #31 overall according to the Ruger-Sorens index of economic and personal freedom. The only Deep South state worse than Louisiana is its neighbor, Mississippi (#40). Mississippi, not coincidentally, was the only other Deep South state to experience net domestic out-migration over that five-year period (–0.15 percent per year).