Migration data · 1990–2022

Which Dallas.

Thirty-three years of IRS county-to-county migration data, used to settle the “DFW discourse” on Twitter.

DFW discourse flared up on Twitter last week. The argument was the usual one, restaged: are people leaving Dallas, finally, after a decade of arrivals everyone had begun treating as a permanent feature of life? And the older question, posted by people who do not live here and answered with a mix of weariness and pride by people who do: why would anyone want to live in Dallas in the first place?

Inside the rebuttals, one local writer pointed out the thing that turns out to be the whole argument. When non-Texans say “Dallas,” they almost always mean the eleven-county Metroplex, the one on track to pass Chicago as the third-largest in the country. To the people who live here, “Dallas” often means the City of Dallas, or Dallas County, the smaller place the metroplex is named after. The discourse is using one word for two different places. The metroplex and the county have entirely different migration stories, and most arguments do not survive being separated by which one they are about.

The IRS has, since 1990, published the data needed to separate them. Every year it reports how many tax-return households moved between any two US counties, and the eleven counties of the Dallas–Fort Worth MSA turn out to be eleven different stories. Some have been gaining people for thirty years straight. One, Dallas County itself, has been losing them the entire time.

I have lived in Dallas a long time. I went and looked at the data.

Three things turn up that the discourse, on either side, does not have right.

The first is the conflation. From far away, DFW is gaining about 250,000 households a year and gross-arriving 110,000 of them from outside the metroplex. From close up, Dallas County itself is losing about 7,000 to 10,000 households a year on net, the way it has every year since 1990. Both are true at the same time. The people who move from Lakewood to Frisco are leaving Dallas-the-city and not leaving Dallas-the-metroplex. They show up in some statistics as movers and others as residents. Whether the city is “growing” or “shrinking” depends entirely on which boundary you draw, and the loud parts of the Twitter argument did not draw one.

The second is that the largest single flow inside DFW comes from inside DFW. In 2022, fifty-seven percent of all moves the IRS recorded as ending in a DFW county began in another DFW county. Households moved from Dallas to Collin, from Tarrant to Denton, from Kaufman to Rockwall. The growing suburbs are growing mostly by absorbing people who already lived twelve miles away. Most of what we have been calling a population boom is a sort. California, the state the discourse cannot stop naming, was twelve percent of arrivals from outside the metroplex in 2022 (gross), and roughly half that in net terms. Twelve thousand households arrived from California; six thousand left for it. The rebuttal posts that lean on “but California” are leaning on a small number doubled.

The third is the sort itself, which is not what you would expect. Dallas County’s outflow in 2022 was 78,000 households, but it does not move as a single block. The households leaving for the rich north suburbs (Collin, Denton) averaged $92,000 of AGI per household. The ones leaving for the south and east suburbs (Kaufman, Hunt, parts of Tarrant) averaged $58,000 to $67,000. The ones leaving DFW altogether averaged $93,000. North and out-of-state get the wealthier movers; south and east get the rest. The wealth sort is directional, not generic. The “rich Californians displacing middle class to suburbs” story is partially right and mostly the wrong direction. Dallas County in 2022 was not, on average, gentrifying through migration. Its arrivals from outside the metroplex averaged $77,000 of AGI per household, while its existing residents averaged $113,500. The newcomers were poorer than the people already there. They were also poorer than most of the people leaving.

Put thirty-three years of those flows on a cumulative graph and you get the answer to Amy Nixon’s question. Yes, lots of millennial families moved to Dallas, bought a house, and turned around. Dallas County has lost roughly 300,000 households on net to its own DFW suburbs since 1990. It has gained about 127,000 from the rest of the country and broken even with the rest of Texas. The population of Dallas County looks flat because two large opposite things are happening at the same speed: the country keeps moving in, the suburbs keep pulling people out, and the arithmetic is the city you live in. The chart for that is at the bottom of this page.

The data on all of this is below, year by year, county by county. Move the slider. Click anything.

DFW arrivals from outside the metroplex, 1990–2022

The share of DFW arrivals coming from outside the eleven-county MSA, broken into three groups: California, the rest of Texas, and the rest of the United States. Intra-DFW moves are excluded from this chart; they are larger than these three combined and get their own section further down. California's share of external arrivals peaked at 15 percent in 2020 (the pandemic year that produced the loudest discourse), was 12 percent in 2022, and has run between 7 and 13 percent for most of the last three decades.

2022 drives the map and every panel below (the cumulative map shows 1990 through this year)

Who sent people to DFW (2022)?

Each US county is colored by how much it sent to DFW. The DFW MSA is outlined. Hover or click a county for the count. The thickest concentrations show the obvious places (Los Angeles, Cook, Maricopa, Harris) and the less obvious ones (Westchester, Dane, Davidson) that the discourse rarely names. Toggle the lens below: a single year, the cumulative total since 1990, or the share of each county’s own filer households that left for DFW.

Households moving to DFW → 101001k10k+

DFW counties: who arrived, who left

Eleven counties, eleven different stories. Click a county tile for its top origins in 2022. Toggle below to exclude intra-DFW arrivals and see only the people each county pulled in from outside the metroplex.

Click a county tile to drill down.

Net migration by state, in and out of DFW

Every flow goes both directions. The bars show households arriving from each state minus households leaving for it, for 2022. California is at the top of the gross list every year and at the top of the net list too, by an unsurprising margin. The states DFW is, on net, sending households to are the ones almost no one talks about. Colorado is the one that shows up most years.

And per DFW county, over time. Of the eleven DFW counties, Dallas is the only one with sustained negative net migration in any year of the dataset. Its annual net runs from minus seven thousand to minus fourteen thousand. Collin, the county next door, is the largest net gainer, every year for thirty years. The growth that Plano and Frisco and McKinney take credit for is, in significant part, the move from one side of the LBJ to the other.

The income sort

For each DFW county, in 2022: the average adjusted gross income of inbound and outbound households, broken into four kinds of move. Higher bars are wealthier movers. The wealth pattern is not subtle. Collin and Rockwall pull in $115,000-AGI households from outside the metroplex. Hunt and Ellis pull in households a third smaller. The "suburbs" are not one thing income-wise. They are several things sorted by which freeway they lie along.

Dallas County alone, over the full timeline. The dashed line is the AGI of households leaving Dallas County for somewhere outside the metroplex. It has been the highest line in every year for which the IRS reports income (1992 onward). Dallas's wealthiest movers do not move to Plano. They move to Austin, Atlanta, Nashville, the places that recruit specifically against Dallas. The middle of Dallas's distribution shuffles to Collin and Tarrant. The top leaves.

The directional sort, drawn in 2022 dollars. Each bar is a flow into or out of Dallas County, sorted by the average AGI of the moving households. The horizontal line is what an average Dallas County resident (a non-mover) earned that year: $113,500 of AGI. Every flow falls below it. People who move are, almost by definition, less established than people who stay. What matters is the spread: Dallas → outside DFW and Dallas → Collin (the wealthier outflows) sit far above Dallas → Tarrant or Kaufman or Hunt. Inflow from Collin to Dallas matches Dallas → Collin almost exactly; the two counties exchange households at roughly the same income level. Inflow from outside DFW falls in the middle of the pack. The IRS data does not let us see top-1% movers separately (it reports flow averages, not income brackets), but the directional pattern is clear without the brackets.

The California check

The same number, sliced two ways. On the left, California's share of total DFW inflow over time, peaking at 6.6 percent in 2021. On the right, the absolute count of California households arriving each year. The first line stays roughly flat. The second line has tripled since 2014. Both are true at the same time. California is sending far more households to DFW than it used to, and DFW is bigger, and the share looks roughly flat while the count goes up. That is what people are seeing when they say "everyone is from California." They are seeing the count, not the share.

And the California counties those households are leaving, in 2022. Los Angeles dominates, the way it dominates every California migration list. Orange and San Diego follow. Most of the California-to-DFW story is, specifically, a Los-Angeles-to-DFW story.

Top non-Texas origin states for DFW in 2022

The fifteen largest non-Texas state origins, ranked. California is at the top by a wide margin. Florida and Illinois follow, distantly. The fifteen states stacked together still add up to less than the intra-DFW shuffle alone.

The intra-DFW shuffle

This is the largest single phenomenon in the data and the one nobody is arguing about on Twitter. Read row to column as "people who moved from the row county to the column county," in 2022. Tarrant and Dallas exchange about twenty-five thousand households a year, in roughly even numbers, year after year. Dallas to Collin is about ten thousand. Dallas to Denton is about three thousand. Collin and Denton trade more than fifteen thousand. The diagonal is left out (those are the people who did not move). The big block of activity in the upper left corner is the heart of the metroplex moving among itself.

The rest of Texas → DFW

"Rural Texas is moving to Dallas" is a story people enjoy telling, including people from rural Texas. The data shows something else. The largest non-DFW Texas county sending households to DFW is Harris (Houston). Travis (Austin) is next. Then Bexar (San Antonio). The largest county anyone would actually call rural is Hood, west of Tarrant, which sent 988 households in 2022. The rural list, on the right, is in the hundreds. The metro list, on the left, is in the thousands. Texas is feeding DFW the way it always has, but most of the feeding is now metro to metro.

Dallas County alone, 1990 to 2022

The chart that explains why Dallas County’s population has stayed roughly flat for thirty years while everyone moved here. The bottom half (red) is the cumulative outflow to the rest of DFW, the rest of Texas, and the rest of the United States. The top half (blue and green) is the cumulative inflow from those same buckets. The black line is the running net total since 1990. Dallas has lost about 300,000 households to its own suburbs over the period and gained about 127,000 from the rest of the country. Those two numbers do not cancel out. They are why the city has not grown the way Plano has, and they are also why Dallas keeps showing up in surveys as a top destination for out-of-state movers. Both stories are happening at the same time, in the same data.

Where this leaves us

The Twitter question of whether millennial families are leaving Dallas after five years has a real answer in the data, and the answer is yes. A lot of them are turning around. They are turning around in a specific direction, mostly north into Collin and Denton, and a smaller number of them are turning around to California or further still. The metroplex they are leaving is not, on close inspection, the metroplex they arrived in. It is a different county inside the same MSA, with different schools and different tax rates and an easier commute, and the IRS records the move as “moved out” because the address is now Frisco. From the eleven-county view that is not a household leaving Dallas. From the inside-the-LBJ view it is.

What the data cannot tell us is which view is the right one to take, or whether the move was worth it. The numbers tell us where people are going. They do not tell us why. The IRS does not collect that. Cost of living, jobs, weather, schools, family, distance from family. People give different answers in different decades. We tend to know our own answers and to suspect everyone else’s. I came here for a job and stayed for the people. (Most people I know who came here say something close to that.) Most people I know who left, when I have asked, say something different. We should ask the leavers more.

The Metroplex and the County keep diverging in slow motion. The Metroplex grows. The County stays roughly flat. The arrivals from out of state are wealthier than the arrivals from across the LBJ, and the highest-earning movers leave the region entirely for the metros that recruit specifically against this one. None of those facts settle the Twitter argument; they just change which side gets to use which one. The argument will be back in two years, on the same platform, with new screenshots of the same numbers. We will all post about it again.

What this data is, and isn’t