Moving Trends: Where Washington Ranks

SEATTLE — The Puget Sound has seen a pretty significant population boom over recent years, but one new study indicates that the boom might be nearing its end.

U-Haul, the moving truck company, tracks its trips into and out of every state each year. They've just released their migration trends ranking showing which states had the highest number of trucks entering state borders in 2020.

Washington took the 38th slot on that list, down from 5th place in 2019. To put that in perspective, that means last year more people drove U-Hauls into Alaska and Rhode Island than they did into Washington.

It's an interesting statistic for the state, but not a totally unpredictable one. As the Washington Office of Financial Management (OFM) notes, the state's net migration is often directly tied to economic activity. Washington has had a fairly turbulent year because of the pandemic, plus migration numbers were already trending down: the OFM's latest population data shows that on April 1, 2020 Washington had a population of 7,656,200, just 1.45 percent larger than the year before and the smallest population growth the state had logged since 2015.

U-Haul's data shows some surprises for other states too. It’s the first time since 2015 that neither Texas nor Florida found itself at the top of U-Haul’s annual list. Tennessee held the top spot for migration growth in 2020, having jumped from No. 12 on the 2019 list.

A U-Haul representative cites the state’s friendly business environment and lack of income tax for the rapid growth in people moving to the Volunteer State.

“There are plenty of jobs. People and companies are taking note,” Jeff Porter, U-Haul Company of Nashville president, said in a statement. “Places like Nashville, Murfreesboro and Clarksville are attracting tons of new residents. Nashville is ever-growing, and even the era of COVID-19 isn’t slowing that.”

At the bottom of the company’s migration growth list from 2020 is California, which in 2020 supplanted Illinois as the state with the greatest net loss of U-Haul trucks.

Data for the ranking comes from U-Haul’s more than 2 million one-way rentals in 2020, according to a news release from the company.