Which states send the most movers to WA, per capita
Every year, California sends far more new residents to Washington than any other state. In my previous column on the number of new driver’s licenses and state ID cards, California easily topped the list, with 26,500 new residents in 2025.
But California is also the most populous state, with more than 39 million residents. Would the Golden State still rank No. 1 if we looked at a rate rather than a total? To find out, I looked at how many people moved to Washington from each state relative to that state’s population.
Using the same data from the Washington state Department of Licensing, I calculated the number of new Washington driver’s licenses and ID cards issued to former residents of each state per 100,000 people.
When adjusted for population, the results look very different from a simple ranking by total movers. States closest to Washington topped the list, and, perhaps surprisingly, California didn’t even make the top 10 in 2025.
Oregon ranked first, with around 378 movers to Washington per 100,000 population. That’s not especially surprising, given its proximity and deep economic and cultural ties to Washington. And of course, Oregon’s most populous city, Portland, is just across the Interstate Bridge from Vancouver. Some movers from Oregon to Washington aren’t even leaving the Portland metro area.
Idaho, the other state adjacent to Washington, ranked second, with 255 movers per 100,000 population. And just as Portland’s metro area spills over into Washington, Spokane’s metro functionally integrates Coeur d’Alene.
Alaska isn’t exactly near any state, but Washington is its closest American neighbor. It ranked third, slightly behind Idaho, with 240 movers per 100,000 population. As I noted in my previous column, Alaska had the biggest decline in movers to Washington from 2019 to 2025, a 40% drop. In 2019, Alaska had the second-highest rate of movers here, after Oregon.
Even though it sends fewer people in absolute terms – around 1,800 movers in 2025 – Alaska’s small population of around 737,000 means those movers translate into a high per capita rate.
Beyond those top three, a clear regional pattern emerges, illustrating how much proximity matters for interstate movers. All the states in the top 10 were in the Western U.S.
As for California, it just missed the top 10, ranking 11th, with 67 movers per 100,000 population.
New Mexico was something of an outlier, with a significantly lower rate of movers to Washington than any other Western state. It ranked only 14th in 2025, with 50 movers per 100,000 people.
At the other end of the spectrum, the three states with the lowest rates of movers to Washington were in the Southeast. West Virginia was at the bottom, with just 9 movers per 100,000 population, followed by Mississippi at 13 and Kentucky at 14.
Similar to California, some of the other highly populated states that ranked in the Top 10 for total movers to Washington in 2025 dropped much lower when ranked by the rate of movers. Texas ranked 16th with 34 movers per 100,000, Florida was 19th with 29 per 100,000, and New York was just 39th with 18 per 100,000.