Relocating retirees were on the move again last year, after the number of movers hit a new low in 2021.
A new report by moving company HireAHelper found that more than 234,000 Americans moved to retire in 2022, a 4% jump over 2021.
But unlike other years when most retirees fled to find new or better homes or to be closer to family, the goal for many this time around was to find destinations with cheaper housing. In fact, 12% of American retirees reported moving for that reason.
“This is one of the first times in a decade that cheaper housing edged out [the desire for a] new or better home,” said Miranda Marquit, chief data analyst for HireAHelper. “People are really concerned about the cost of living, and inflation is a big part of that.”
Only 10% of retirees in the study said they relocated for new or better housing. That’s down from 18% as recently as 2019.
Marquit noted that the pandemic also sent retirees packing. The number of retiree movers decreased from roughly 350,000 in 2018 to about 300,000 in 2019, she said, though there was a spike in 2020 due to Covid-19. At that point, people were relocating to a place where they felt safer or because they’d lost a job or income, because they wanted to be with family or because their work situation had changed and they could work remotely.
Where did all those retirees end up? Many of them went to Florida.
HireAHelper’s report for 2022, called “Where Americans Moved To Retire This Year,” found that retirees continued to flock to the Sunshine State, which attracted roughly 12% of the retirees in the survey. The top metro destination for retirement movers was the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville area. North Carolina came in second with 9.6% of movers, followed by Michigan with 6.6%. Arizona and Georgia rounded out the top five, with Arizona attracting 5.9% of the movers and Georgia luring 5.8%.
A new entrant on the 2022 top 10 list was the state of Washington, which placed seventh with roughly 5% of out-of-state retirees. Marquit was not sure why Washington sprang into the list, since, she noted, it’s not a “particularly inexpensive” place to live. She said the attraction could be the rich cultures in cities such as Tacoma and Spokane.
Michigan was also a surprise at No. 3, Marquit said, noting that most retirees want to go to states with warm weather. “It’s got to be a combination of it being inexpensive and there are some beautiful things in Michigan like the Upper Peninsula,” she said. She added that homes near Detroit are reasonably priced.
One notable disappearance from this year’s top 10 list is Tennessee. The Volunteer State notably edged out Florida last year as the most popular state for retirees, who were likely attracted to the low taxes, cheap housing, good weather and the Great Smoky Mountains, she said. HireAHelper’s 2021 report showed 20% of Americans under 65 left their state to retire in Tennessee, which has the lowest taxes of all the states.
So its disappearance from the 2022 top 10 is a bit of a mystery. Marquit surmised that prices probably rose with the influx of residents in recent years, and the state also had a record year for tornadoes in 2021.
Just as clothing goes in and out of fashion, however, so do destinations, Marquit suggested, “and it was quite the fashion for Tennessee for a while.” Yet there are basic pieces that are always in style, she said, and Florida is one of them. “It’s the little black dress of retirement,” she said.
Marquit lives in Idaho, and she said she sees similar patterns in her state. Boise was the top city retirees flocked to in 2020. But in 2022, Idaho ranked behind Oregon and Maryland as the state retirees were most likely to leave. “All that inflow kind of pushes the housing prices up,” she said. “I bemoan how much it cost to buy a home in Idaho, but it’s still cheaper than buying a home in a lot of other places.”
The migration study analyzed more than 107,000 local and long-distance moves in the U.S. booked through HireAHelper.com (and its partner sites and affiliates) in 2022. The study also used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s current population survey and annual social/economic supplements.