California’s exodus isn’t just billionaires — it’s | Real Estate news

It isn’t just billionaires leaving California.

Anecdotal data recommend there’s also an exodus of common people who load their belongings into rental vehicles and lug them to another state.

U-Haul’s survey of the more than 2.5 million one-way journeys utilizing its autos in the U.S. last yr confirmed that the hole between the quantity of people leaving and the quantity arriving was larger in California than in any other state.

While the Golden State also attracts a large quantity of newcomers, it has had the largest internet outflow for six years in a row.

Generally, the defectors don’t go far. The top 5 locations for the diaspora utilizing U-Haul’s vehicles, trailers and bins last yr had been Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Texas.

California skilled a internet outflow of U-Haul customers with an in-migration of 49.4%, and those leaving of 50.6%. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Illinois also rank among the underside 5 on the index.

U-Haul didn’t speculate on the explanations California continues to top the rating.

“We continue to find that life circumstances — marriage, children, a death in the family, college, jobs and other events — dictate the need for most moves,” John Taylor, U-Haul International president, said in a press assertion.

While California’s exodus was higher than any other state, the silver lining was that the state misplaced fewer residents to out-of-state migration in 2025 than in 2024.

U-Haul said that broadly the hotly debated issue of blue-to-red state migration, which grew to become more pronounced after the pandemic of 2020, continues to be a discernible development.

Though U-Haul didn’t specify the explanations for the exodus, California demographers monitoring the development level to the associated fee of residing and housing affordability as the top causes for leaving.

“Over the last dozen years or so, on a net basis, the flow out of the state because of housing [affordability] far exceeds other reasons people cite [including] jobs or family,” said Hans Johnson, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

“This net out migration from California is a more than two-decade-long trend. And again, we’re a big state, so the net out numbers are big,” he said.

U-Haul data confirmed that there was a fairly even cut up between arrivals and departures. While the company declined to share absolute numbers, it said that 50.6% of its one-way prospects in California had been leaving, while 49.4% had been arriving.

U-Haul’s community of 24,000 rental areas across the U.S. offers a near-real-time view of home migration dynamics, while official data on population actions often lags.

California’s population grew by a marginal 0.05% in the yr ending July 2025, reaching 39.5 million people, according to the California Department of Finance.

After two consecutive years of population decline following the 2020 pandemic, California recorded its third yr of population growth in 2025. While worldwide migration has rebounded, the quantity of California residents transferring out elevated to 216,000, constant with ranges in 2018 and 2019.

Eric McGhee, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who researches the challenges going through California, said there’s growing evidence of political leanings shaping the state’s migration patterns, with those transferring out of state more possible to be Republican and those transferring in possible to be Democratic.

“Partisanship probably is not the most significant of these considerations, but it may be just the last straw that broke the camel’s back, on top of the other things that are more traditional drivers of migration … cost of living and family and friends and jobs,” McGhee said.

Living in California prices 12.6% more than the national average, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. One of the largest pain factors in the state is housing, which is 57.8% more costly than what the average American pays.

The U-Haul examine across all 50 states discovered that 7 of the top 10 growth states where people moved to have Republican governors. Nine of the states with the largest internet outflows had Democrat governors.

Texas, Florida and North Carolina had been the top three growth states for U-Haul prospects, with Dallas, Houston and Austin bagging the top spots for growth in metro areas.

A notable exception in California was San Diego and San Francisco, which had been the only California cities in the top 25 metros with a internet influx of one-way U-Haul prospects.