How Successful Is Your Region at Retaining Domestic Migrants

Introduction

As the US population ages and the natural increase (defined as births minus deaths) declines in more regions, attracting residents from other parts of the country, or "domestic migrants," is becoming increasingly important for maintaining a given region's population and workforce. Local leaders often believe that once someone has lived in their area, this person will want to stay. How often is this true? In this District Data Brief, we use the long histories of individuals' locations drawn from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel to measure the retention of migrants who have moved to regions across the country. This analysis builds on our recent District Data Brief, "How Successful Is Your Region at Retaining Its Native Residents?" We find that metro areas with faster growth rates retain a higher percentage of their in-migrants and that population growth is highest if a region combines high retention with robust in-migration. In the Fourth Federal Reserve District,¹only Columbus and Lexington successfully translate high retention of migrants into population growth.

Data and Definitions
The estimates of individuals' long-run patterns of migration are created with a random, anonymous sample drawn from credit histories maintained by Equifax, known as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel (CCP). Almost nine of 10 adults in the United States have accounts with creditors (for example, mortgages, student loans, auto loans, and credit cards), and these lenders report billing addresses to the credit bureaus each month. The CCP data include the county that contains the borrower's billing address, and this enables us to observe each quarter whether an individual is living in their home region or another region. When borrowers first apply for credit, we designate them as a native of the region in which they are living.²Because the CCP begins in 1999, we must limit the analysis to people born in 1981 or later, as credit histories do not start until age 18 (typically between 18 and 23), and we need to observe people when their credit history begins to accurately place them in their home region.

Some of the results presented below are disaggregated by credit score. The score available in the CCP is the Equifax Risk Score. Like other credit scores, it uses information in borrowers' credit records to predict the probability of their becoming delinquent on debts.

In this District Data Brief, the term "metro" refers to a Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) as defined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The US Department of Agriculture groups rural counties into regions called "commuting zones" (CZs) based on how frequently people drive between the counties for work. We use the CZ definitions for all nonmetro counties so that we can include all counties in our calculations. We define "large metros" as those with populations of greater than 1 million for graphs of the top-10 and bottom-10 metros. To better illustrate certain relationships, the samples in scatterplots include all regions with populations of greater than 500,000.

Retention Estimates

To measure domestic migrant retention, we begin by identifying every person represented in the CCP data who moves away from their home region. For each destination region to which they move, we look at all the quarters we can observe for the arriving migrants, from the time of their first arrival through the second quarter of 2024, the most recent quarter for which data are available. We then calculate the share of those observed quarters during which the migrants were reported to still be living in that destination. We refer to this ratio as the migrant retention rate; it tells us how successful the region is at retaining people who have arrived from elsewhere.

The top 10 metros in the nation as ranked by migrant retention rate are almost all among the fastest growing in the country. Among them, Denver, Nashville, and Austin have seen particularly strong growth over the last two decades. By contrast, the bottom 10 metros as ranked by migrant retention include mostly slow-growing or shrinking places including Buffalo, Rochester, and Providence. One Fourth District metro, Cleveland, is among the bottom 10.

In Figure 1, the green bars represent the migrant retention measure calculated for individuals with Equifax Risk Scores in the top third of the distribution. Higher scores indicate these borrowers have consistently paid their debts on time, suggesting they probably have in-demand skills and strong earning power. In some of the more expensive metros, including Denver, Seattle, San Diego, and Honolulu, in-migrants with higher Equifax Risk Scores are more likely to stay than in-migrants with lower scores.