Money Migration › Methodology
Money Migration Power Rankings — Methodology
Field: 50 states + D.C.. Accountable official: Governor. Cadence: annual. Data retrieved 2026-06-20.
Framed as correlation with tax/cost/jobs conditions under current leadership — NOT causation. Net AGI = the dollars of adjusted gross income that moved in minus out (IRS Statistics of Income, 2021→2022).
Weights are public so the ranking cannot be called rigged. Each dimension is normalized 0–100 across all ranked states & D.C. (min–max; inverted where lower is better), multiplied by its weight, and summed to the 0–100 composite. A metric that is unavailable for an entity is never estimated — the remaining weights are rescaled and the composite flagged “partial.”
| Dimension | Source | Direction | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net income migration (AGI moved in − out) | IRS SOI 2021→2022 (inflow − outflow AGI) | Higher better ▲ | 35 |
| Net household migration | IRS SOI 2021→2022 (inflow − outflow returns) | Higher better ▲ | 30 |
| In/out migration ratio | IRS SOI 2021→2022 (inflow ÷ outflow returns) | Higher better ▲ | 15 |
| Population growth (YoY) | Census ACS B01003 (2022→2023) | Higher better ▲ | 10 |
| Multi-year momentum pending | multi-year IRS series ingest pending | — | 10 |
Provenance
Primary source: IRS Statistics of Income + U.S. Census Bureau · https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-migration-data.