Affordability Now Outranks Jobs as the Reason Families Move
New data tracking long-distance moves between January 2025 and March 2026 shows 58 percent of people who relocated cited affordability as their primary reason for the move, ahead of family and community ties at 41 percent and well ahead of career opportunities, according to the PODS Moving Trends Report, an annual analysis built from the moving and storage company’s own container relocation data. Newsweek’s mapping of the report shows the destinations clustering heavily in one region: eight of the top ten move-in markets sit in the Sun Belt.
Where Everyone Is Headed
The Myrtle Beach-Wilmington corridor spanning South Carolina and North Carolina topped the list of move-in destinations for the fourth consecutive year, according to the report. Ocala, Florida, Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh, and Greenville-Spartanburg rounded out the top five. Florida doubled its overall representation among the top-ranked destination markets compared with the prior year’s report.
The Cities Doing the Sending
On the other end of the move, Los Angeles ranked as the top move-out market for a fifth consecutive year, the report found. Miami, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Long Island rounded out the top five sources of outbound movers. California alone accounted for seven of the top twenty move-out markets nationally; nearly 10 million people left California for other states between 2010 and 2024, based on the same data.
James Shively, chief operating officer at PODS, said in the company’s own release announcing the findings that affordability is now the primary driver behind where people choose to live. That single shift, from chasing a job to chasing a lower cost of living, is reshaping which cities gain population and which ones keep shrinking.
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