Paul O'Leary's Blog

Someone called me today asking about some national relocation statistics. So I looked through some of our records here and found a few interesting points.

I came across an interesting summary by the census talking about how many people are moving in a year in the US. For 2003, the census bureau said that almost 31 million people over 16 years old moved in 2003. That's almost 14% of the population over the age of 16.

More than half of these 31 million people (and their children) moved within their county, while increasingly smaller percentages moved to another county, another state, or abroad. Corporate relocations would tend to be the longer distance moves(people moving to another county, or further). There's a slightly complicated 50 mile rule that we can discuss another day.

So, 14% of the population may not seem like a lot of people, but remember that those numbers are just for a year. The 5 year rates of moving are around 46%!