The Great Income Migration
Where American income actually moves, measured from the addresses on federal tax returns: net adjusted gross income gained or lost by eight states to interstate migration, every year since 2012. Florida's annual haul quadrupled after 2020 to nearly forty billion dollars at the peak; California swung from roughly break-even to double-digit losses; New York, Illinois, and New Jersey bleed steadily throughout. This is not survey data — it is the money on the returns themselves, which makes it the hardest evidence available for the Sun Belt shift visible in this dashboard's housing charts.
What does it show?
Tax returns track the money: Florida gained $21 billion of adjusted gross income from interstate movers in the latest year; California lost $12 billion. The gap blew out after 2020 and still runs at multiples of its pre-pandemic pace.
Methodology
For each filing-year pair, the IRS matches tax returns by address to count households moving between states, with their total adjusted gross income. Net AGI is income arriving minus income leaving, in nominal dollars, domestic moves only. Years label the later filing year (2023 = returns filed in 2023 from a new state after filing in 2022 from the old one). The IRS series is the money actually on tax returns, not survey estimates.