MOVING - Leaving Los Angeles has become the most common long-distance move in the country. LA County lost more residents last year than any other county in the United States, and it has held the number one spot on the national move-out list for five years running. That is not a mood on social media. It is what the Census Bureau and the moving industry's own data say about people leaving Los Angeles. Here are the numbers, where the people moving from LA are actually going, and what a move out of LA costs once you get past the headline quotes.
How Many People Are Leaving Los Angeles: The Numbers Behind the Exodus
Between July 2024 and July 2025, Los Angeles County's population fell by 53,934 people, from roughly 9.75 million to 9.69 million. That was the largest decline of any county in the country, according to the Census Bureau's 2025 estimates. Anyone asking how many people are leaving California can start there: the state's largest county is where most of the loss is concentrated.
The detail that matters is how that number breaks down:
- Births minus deaths: +22,581
- International migration: +91,048
- Domestic migration: -76,146
LA is still gaining people from abroad and still has more births than deaths. What is pulling the total down is domestic migration: Angelenos relocating to other parts of the country at a rate that overwhelms every other source of growth.
The moving companies see the same picture from the other side. The PODS Moving Trends Report, which tracks the company's own container moves, put Los Angeles at number one for move-outs in 2026 for the fifth consecutive year. The other markets near the top of that list are the ones you would expect: South Florida, Northern California, Washington D.C. and Long Island.
Why People Are Leaving Los Angeles and California
Ask ten people why they left LA and you will get ten stories, but the surveys and the migration data on why people are leaving California cluster around four reasons.
Housing. The median one-bedroom in Los Angeles rents for around $2,450 a month, and buying is out of reach for most households earning the county's median income. For a two-earner couple, that is manageable. For anyone whose job can be done from Phoenix, it is a monthly bill that stops making sense.
Everything else costs more too. Gas, groceries and utilities all run above the national average. Car insurance in particular jumped sharply after 2024, and several major carriers stopped writing new home policies in the state. The question of why insurance companies are leaving California and the question of why residents are leaving turn out to have the same answer: risk that keeps repricing upward.
Fire risk. The January 2025 fires in the Palisades and Altadena displaced thousands of households outright and pushed many more to reconsider where they live. Insurance non-renewals followed.
Remote work. This is the enabler. Someone with a California salary and a hybrid schedule can keep the job and cut their rent in half by moving to Nevada, Arizona or Texas. That option did not exist at scale before 2020. It is also part of why businesses are leaving California: when the workforce can be anywhere, the office can be too.
Put together, those four explain why so many people are leaving California in general and LA in particular. None of them is cyclical.
Where People Moving From LA Are Going
The destinations split into two groups.
Nearby, same lifestyle, lower cost. Riverside and San Bernardino counties gained a combined 21,131 residents in the same year LA lost 54,000. The Las Vegas area gained more than 21,000. These are the people who want to stay within a drive of family and friends. Many of them commute back into LA a few days a week.
Out of state, for good. Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), Arizona (Phoenix, Scottsdale), Nevada (Las Vegas, Reno), Florida (Tampa, Miami) and Tennessee (Nashville) take most of the long-distance moves. Moves from Los Angeles to Austin, Las Vegas, Portland or Chicago are all well-worn routes now. The PODS report found that Sun Belt cities made up 80 percent of the top destination markets in 2026, up from 75 percent the year before, and named affordability as the single biggest driver.
The reverse coastal move is smaller but real. Moving from Los Angeles to New York is the path for a steady share of people who came west in their twenties and head back east in their thirties.
What It Actually Costs to Move Out of Los Angeles
This is the part most stories about moving out of LA skip, and it is the part that decides whether a move happens.
Local moves (Inland Empire, Orange County, San Diego). A two-person crew and a truck for a one-bedroom runs $400 to $1,200 depending on distance and stairs. You can do it in a day.
Long-distance moves (out of state). Pricing is by weight and distance, and the numbers climb fast:
- A full-service van line, which packs and delivers, charges roughly $3,000 to $8,000 for a two- or three-bedroom home going to Texas or Arizona, and more for the East Coast. Most van lines have a minimum shipment weight of 2,000 to 3,500 pounds. If your load is under that, you pay for the minimum anyway.
- A portable container that you load yourself costs about 30 percent less than full service for the same home, but you pay for the whole container whether it is full or half empty, and you need somewhere to park it, which in most of LA means a street permit.
- A rental truck is the cheapest on paper, around 60 percent less than full service, until you add fuel across the desert, one-way fees, hotels and the days off work.
None of those options fits the typical person moving out of Los Angeles, who has a studio or one-bedroom and about 800 to 1,500 pounds of things worth taking once the IKEA furniture is sold. For that size of move, cross country movers in Los Angeles that specialize in small loads price by the pound with no truck minimum; Ship Smart, for example, picks up from LA apartments and ships between 150 and 2,000 pounds anywhere in the country, typically for a fraction of a van-line quote. Transit is slower, usually a week to three, because the shipment shares a truck heading the same direction, but for a one-bedroom that trade-off can be several thousand dollars.
What to Sell Before You Go
The single biggest lever on a long-distance bill is weight, and LA has one of the fastest resale markets in the country. Before requesting any quotes:
- Sell particleboard furniture, big-box shelving, patio sets and the second TV. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp will move them in a weekend, and they cost less to rebuy in Austin than to ship there.
- Ship the things you would pay to replace: a good mattress, solid-wood pieces, art, instruments, books, kitchen equipment, the bike.
- Leave cleaning supplies, opened pantry food, plants (most states restrict them at the border anyway) and the cables nobody can identify.
Every hundred pounds cut is money off the quote.
Are People Really Leaving LA, or Is the Exodus Overstated?
Partly overstated. Los Angeles County still has 9.7 million people and is still gaining residents from abroad. The share of people moving out of Los Angeles in any given year is small in percentage terms, and plenty of people still ask why people move to LA at all and then do it: the weather, the industries, the sheer size of the job market. Some of the people leaving LA come back within a couple of years.
But the direction has been the same for five years, the reasons are structural rather than cyclical, and the people leaving skew toward renters in their late twenties to forties, which is the group that shapes a city's next decade.
If you are one of the people relocating out of Los Angeles this year, the move is more affordable than the headline quotes suggest, provided you move what you actually own rather than what a van line assumes you own.
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