Massachusetts is losing residents at a worrisome rate — as many as 33,000 over the one-year stretch from July 2024 to July 2025, according to fresh U.S. Census Bureau data. And the state ranks 46th in the country for population growth, according to a January report from the truck rental giant U-Haul. (The only consolation from the U-Haul list: New York and California are even lower on the U-Haul list.)
Numbers tell part of the story. The 33,000-person outflow is 53% higher than the prior teabag year. I should note that, due to immigration from other countries, the state is actually gaining population overall.
But who are the people who’ve left? I reached out to my extended network to find a half-dozen former denizens of Massachusetts now living elsewhere. I was primarily hunting for people who hadn’t moved because they retired, and also hadn’t moved during the COVID pandemic.
The top three factors that influenced their decision probably won’t surprise you: housing costs, taxes and the weather. Day care costs popped up for families with young kids. None of these people moved because they couldn’t find work here.
The last time I saw Scott Bailey in Massachusetts, he was working on a modular housing startup that had set up a few model homes in Chelsea. He left the state in 2021.
“We had two kids in an 800-square-foot condo in (Dorchester), with plans for a third… Taxes were over $10,000 a year. Child care was on track for $8,000 a year,” Bailey wrote via email. In Charlotte, Bailey and his wife bought a house for less money than they had sold their condo for, and found child care for three kids that cost less than they had paid for their first two in Boston.
Despite that, Bailey, 38, said that the ability for new arrivals to Boston “to get connected to people on accelerated timelines shouldn’t be understated. Charlotte is fragmented and doesn’t have the same kind of hometown pride from its leaders.”
Bill Shander, 57, an author and information design specialist, said he shifted his life from Hopkinton to Placitas, New Mexico, on the outskirts of Albuquerque, in part for the weather.
“I am approaching retirement, and selling our expensive real estate in Boston and trading for much less expensive digs” in New Mexico, as well as a second residence in Todos Santos, Mexico, was appealing, he added.
Shander has no mortgage now and is paying less in property taxes.
Housing costs were also a factor for Austin Williams and his wife, both in their mid-30s. They were renting in a Charlestown triple-decker, with one child and a second on the way. Williams said they were feeling like the “price of admission for ownership (was) north of $1 million” in that part of the city.
So in 2023, they purchased a home just outside Portland, Maine, near a beach. Williams said they found affordable child care, “top-notch people (and) endless activities.”
Their old friends in Boston are only 90 minutes away.
Like many newly-minted graduates before her, Jolie Gan ended up in San Francisco after finishing a master’s degree in computational neuroscience at MIT. Rather than remaining in academia or working for a large biopharma company in Cambridge, Gan went west in 2025. California “has more of an appetite for risk and failure,” she said, not to mention higher wages and “more of a willingness to push the sci-fi.”
Family drew Aquil Abdullah from Ipswich to Washington, D.C. in 2024. Initially, he kept working remotely for a Boston company, Hydrow, which makes an Internet-connected rowing machine.
Abdullah was both a software developer for the company and a rowing instructor. He left that job in September 2025 and now has his own consulting firm.
Abdullah hypothesized that while the opportunity to work remotely first cropped up for many people during COVID, more of them are now redesigning their lives to take advantage of that flexibility.
“I think that there’s definitely a population that is moving as a result of the digital nomad life being more accessible now,” he said.
That was true for David Hayes, a longtime tech recruiter in Boston who began spending more time working from Florida and New Hampshire during COVID, and then became a Utah resident in January 2025.
One factor was a daughter and son-in-law who earned their college degrees in New England, but wound up employed by tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hayes and his wife wanted to be close to them, so they bought a condo in Park City, Utah.
While Hayes contended that he’s “not a Massachusetts basher,” he found the weather here “oppressive,” the cost of living “very high,” and said “the access to outdoors was limited.”
In Park City, Hayes, who is in his 50s, said he found that “people are here because they want to be here, and they’re happy.”
Scott White and his husband bought a house in Fort Lauderdale in February 2020, and used it for vacation rentals at first. But it became their permanent residence in 2022.
“Even though we both grew up in New England, each winter we became less tolerant of the cold and snow,” White said. “We were at a point in our lives where we were looking for a change, and we sold our place in (Boston’s) South End and moved down here.” As a recruiter in the biotech and pharma industries, White said he set up a home office and worked remotely. (Coincidentally, he used to work with Hayes.)
While White, 54, said he misses “all of the cultural richness that the city offers,” he appreciates “having a house, a pool, more privacy and a quieter lifestyle.”
If state officials want to stem this exodus, they should probably move fast, rather than spending the next decade debating what to do. Once people leave, it can be pretty challenging to get them back.
Asked if he could see moving back, White said he might consider it “if one of us needed serious medical care,” or potentially coming back for half the year, but remaining a Florida resident. (That state has no income tax.)
Williams, who previously worked in economic development for the city of Boston, referred to the “high switching costs” of anyone moving back to a higher-cost city once a couple wanted to own a home or had kids attending schools elsewhere.
“I’m a happy customer of Maine at this point,” he said. “The hypothesis that we had, which was that Maine would … check a lot of the boxes that we wanted to check, lo and behold, they all got checked.”
He didn’t rule out returning to Massachusetts once he and his wife were empty-nesters, but said that “we would just as easily consider New York City or someplace else.”
Sounding a little wistful — but also content in North Carolina — Bailey wrote, “I’ll always love Boston.”
