Bay Area: California Lost a Net $11.9B in Income
IRS data: California lost a net $11.9B of adjusted gross income to other states in 2022-23. Bay Area movers went to Texas first.
- Source Briefing
- Data feed
California lost a net $11.9 billion of adjusted gross income to other states in 2022-23, the largest loss of any state, according to our analysis of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) state-to-state migration files. The Bay Area is one of the regions those households left from.
Why it matters
Bay Area developers, lenders and brokers watch income leaving as a proxy for office, housing and retail demand. The $11.9 billion is a statewide total, not a Bay Area figure, and the IRS files do not split it by county. What we can measure locally is the headcount: more people left the Bay Area for other states than arrived from them.
The news that moved today. Free email. Every weekday morning.
The numbers
The IRS counts the adjusted gross income (AGI) on tax returns that changed state between filing years. California’s outflow exceeded its inflow by a net $11.9 billion, ahead of New York (-$9.9 billion) and Illinois (-$6.0 billion). Our companion migration story shows 101,320 people moved from the Bay Area to other states in 2022-23 while 79,009 moved in, a net loss of 22,311 people. Texas took the most Bay Area movers, followed by New York, Washington, Nevada and Oregon. The series covers domestic moves only.
What’s next
The IRS has not published 2023-24 files, so 2022-23 is the latest year. We will update when the next file is released. More local coverage is on the San Francisco market page.
Method note: net income is the IRS state inflow file minus the state outflow file for 2022-23, adjusted gross income in billions of dollars, domestic moves only. The IRS counts tax filers and their claimed dependents, so it does not cover every mover. The data is public: IRS Statistics of Income migration data.
On the record
Net adjusted gross income moved between states in 2022-23, computed by subtracting IRS state outflow from state inflow ('Total Migration-US' rows), California -$11.9B in billions
Our data · irs.gov
Primary record
- Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income migration dataState-to-state and county-to-county migration data, 2022-23