Americans are moving at half the rate they used to — why?

High interest rates and many of the sought-after locations have seen their housing prices go into the stratosphere. Hard to walk away from a 2% mortgage.

Americans are moving at half the rate they used to — why?

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If you’ve made the exciting (stressful) decision to pack up your life and move in the past few years, it turns out you’re very much in the minority, with Americans increasingly staying put in modern times.

Moving’s out

According to yearly figures from the Current Population Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau and reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, domestic migration rates are hovering near all-time recorded lows after just 7.9% of Americans switched towns or cities last year. That’s fewer than half of the 16.7% who were on the move in 1994, as the share of people relocating even within the same county has plummeted from 10.4% three decades ago to a little over 4% now.

So, what happened?

Homeowners being “locked in” to their current houses isn’t helping, as the prospect of trading in the generous mortgage rate they may have picked up around the pandemic for the current ~7% level proves, understandably, unappealing. But mortgage rates were high in the past as well, suggesting that more structural influences are also at play.

Wider societal shifts like the rise of dual-income households and an aging population have also weighed on US dynamism, given the complications of having to factor two careers into big relocation decisions and the fact that we tend to move less as we get older.

Technology, meanwhile, has made the ability to work remotely more feasible, fraying the cord that required people to move closer to their office jobs. Disproportionately higher rents in the likes of LA, New York, and Miami may also be discouraging people from moving to some of America’s most sought-after cities.

Furthermore, research suggests that wage differentials between states have generally been getting smaller, a megatrend that’s been evident in the US since the late 1800s, reducing the incentive to move in some cases. It’s rarely now a local labor market — often it’s a national, or even an international, one.

The current work environment is likely a major short-term factor figuring in decisions, too. After quitting rates boomed in 2021, many employees are now hanging on to their jobs, per the Journal, as the labor market slows and the outlook for grads and people looking to forge a new career path elsewhere grows bleaker.