06/08/2026
Note that every state on the Top Ten Net Loss list is.... blue.
📊 California lost a net 56,858 adults 60 and over to other states in 2023 - the largest outflow in the country.
A few folks asked for fresher numbers after the April post, so this one pulls from the Census Bureau's 2023 one-year survey instead of the 2015 to 2019 averages.
One change worth flagging: this dataset counts adults 60 and over rather than 65 and over, so the figures aren't a clean apples-to-apples comparison with what I shared before.
New York's annual loss jumped from roughly 23,000 in the older data to 39,123, and almost three retirees left for every one who arrived in New York City alone.
Florida still leads the gainers at a net of 44,504. North Carolina and Arizona are effectively tied for second at just over 20,000 each.
Commenters who predicted South Carolina and Delaware would climb called it right. South Carolina now sits fourth, and Delaware's net gain of 4,519 is the largest in its history relative to a state of about one million people.
One limitation a reader raised correctly: raw counts favor big states. As a share of its 60-plus population, Delaware's gain is proportionally larger than Texas's.
Keep in mind these are single-year figures, and one-year survey estimates carry wider margins of error than the five-year averages in the earlier post.
