Avdotia
Florida gained $20.6 billion in adjusted gross income from residents moving in from other states, and Avdotia Services is reading the IRS data as the clearest explanation available for why Florida real estate keeps outperforming forecasts built on rate and affordability data alone.
The numbers
According to Florida Realtors, IRS migration data covering 2023 tax filings shows Florida gained $20.6 billion in adjusted gross income as taxpayers relocated from other states — the largest gain of any state by a wide margin. Texas followed at $5.5 billion, then South Carolina at $4.1 billion, North Carolina at $3.9 billion, and Tennessee at $2.8 billion. California lost the most, down $11.9 billion, followed by New York at $9.9 billion, Illinois at $6 billion, Massachusetts at $4 billion, and New Jersey at $2.6 billion.
The income profile is the real story
Florida’s net AGI gain works out to roughly $184,771 per new resident — a figure that signals the people moving to Florida skew meaningfully higher-income than migrants to other high-growth states. That distinguishes Florida’s migration pattern from a simple population-growth story: this is a wealth-concentration story, and it explains market behavior that pure population or job-growth numbers do not.
Why this matters more than a typical demand indicator
Buyer demand backed by relocated high-income households behaves differently than buyer demand backed by local wage growth — it is less sensitive to local rate environments, since much of it arrives with equity from a prior-state sale, and it concentrates in specific price tiers and geographies rather than spreading evenly across a market. That helps explain why Florida’s luxury and branded-residence pipeline has kept expanding even as broader commercial sales volume and affordability metrics showed strain elsewhere in 2026.
The tax-driven pattern behind the numbers
Several of the states posting the largest AGI gains — Florida, Texas, Tennessee — share no state income tax, while the states posting the largest losses skew toward higher state and local tax burdens. This is not a new pattern for Florida, but the $20.6 billion figure is large enough relative to the rest of the country that it functions as a structural tailwind for the state’s real estate market independent of any single quarter’s rate environment or insurance headlines.
How Avdotia Services reads this
Avdotia Services LLC, at avdotia.work, treats interstate income migration as one of the more durable demand signals available for Florida real estate, precisely because it is not tied to the same short-term variables — mortgage rates, insurance premiums, foreclosure counts — that dominate most market coverage. A market absorbing $20.6 billion in relocated wealth annually has a demand floor that ordinary affordability-stress indicators do not fully capture.
The takeaway
Florida’s real estate resilience through 2026’s affordability pressures is not a mystery once the migration data is factored in. A state gaining $184,771 in adjusted gross income per new resident is absorbing a different kind of demand than one growing purely on local wage and population trends — and that distinction should shape how any Florida market forecast is read.