NYC Exodus: Millionaires, Remote Work, and Mamdani’s Tax Fight

The NYC exodus refers to the net loss of more than 911,000 residents to other states between April 2020 and July 2025, a shift that left New York City with roughly 8.58 million people, about 220,000 fewer than five years earlier. International arrivals and a birth surplus softened the blow for a while, but a sharp drop in immigration in the year ending July 2025 exposed how much the city had come to depend on newcomers from abroad to offset domestic departures.¹²

How Big the Outflow Is and How It Has Changed

Domestic outmigration peaked in the twelve months ending July 2021, when the city lost a net 329,532 residents to other states. It fell to 212,791 the following year, then to roughly 121,000 in 2023 and 94,000 in 2024. The Department of City Planning called those later figures similar to pre-pandemic norms. Then the trend reversed. Net domestic outflow climbed back to 113,718 in the year ending July 2025.¹

International migration had been the offset. About 220,000 international newcomers arrived in the year ending July 2024. That number fell 70 percent the next year, to roughly 66,000, a drop the Citizens Budget Commission attributed to tighter federal immigration enforcement.²³ With that cushion gone, the city’s total population fell by 12,200 between July 2024 and July 2025, erasing two years of modest recovery. Births still outpace deaths by roughly 36,000 a year, but the Department of City Planning noted that migration, not natural change, dominates the population trajectory.¹

Among the eleven U.S. cities with more than a million residents, New York’s three-percent population decline through 2024 was the largest by a wide margin, according to the Empire Center.⁴

Where People Are Going

The destinations have stayed consistent. IRS migration data for 2022–2023 shows the largest net outflows of New York State tax returns went to Florida (21,176 net returns), New Jersey (16,906), North Carolina (6,905), Pennsylvania (6,231), and Connecticut (5,049). The state tax department described the pattern as movement toward warmer, neighboring, and less expensive states.⁵

Survey data from 2024 confirmed a similar top five: New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Connecticut. Being closer to family was the most cited reason for the move (24 percent), followed by retirement (19 percent) and work (18 percent).⁶

Who Is Leaving and How Much Income Is Going With Them

The people leaving tend to earn more than the people arriving. The Citizens Budget Commission reported in April 2026 that between 2019 and 2023, residents who left the city earned a collective $68 billion more than those who moved in. Of that difference, $23 billion went to other parts of New York State, $14 billion to Florida, and $2 billion to Texas.⁷

The Comptroller’s office measured the balance in federal adjusted gross income terms. In 2020, the net AGI outflow reached $22.1 billion, including $10.2 billion from filers earning more than $1 million. By 2023, both figures had fallen sharply, to $2.1 billion overall and $600 million among millionaire filers, suggesting the highest-income departures slowed once pandemic disruptions eased.⁸

Over a longer horizon, the CBC estimated that the city’s share of the nation’s millionaire households declined by 2.3 percentage points between 2010 and 2022. Had the share held steady, the city would be collecting roughly $2.5 billion more in personal income tax annually.⁷ The National Taxpayers Union Foundation put the statewide impact higher, estimating that New York’s declining share of the national millionaire population cost the state $12.2 billion in forgone revenue in 2022.⁹

One shift worth noting: while the raw outmigration numbers have come down, the CBC’s April 2026 tracker found the share of departures is now roughly equal across income levels, a change from the pandemic period when upper-income and white residents led the outflow.³

Is It Really About Taxes?

Whether taxes are driving the wealthy out of New York is contested. The state tax department reported 1,679 millionaire filers moved out of state in 2024, down from a pandemic peak of 3,303 in 2020, with a migration rate of 2.49 percent, close to pre-pandemic norms.⁵

A December 2023 report from the Fiscal Policy Institute found no statistically significant evidence that New York’s 2021 increase in top state income tax rates prompted additional departures. The report also noted that the richest one percent of New Yorkers leave the state at roughly one-quarter the rate of the general population in normal years, and that 59 percent of top-earner out-migrants moved to other high-tax states rather than to tax-free ones.¹⁰ Research cited by Vital City NYC put the annual tax-motivated millionaire move rate at roughly 0.3 percent.¹¹

The Comptroller’s office acknowledged the other side of the argument: the pandemic showed that high-earner departures can spike sharply when remote work severs the link between where someone works and where they live.⁸

Remote Work and the Donut Effect

A Congressional Research Service report from May 2025 found that 29.4 percent of paid workdays nationally were performed from home as of January 2025. That is down from the pandemic peak of 61.5 percent but still four times the pre-pandemic rate of 7.2 percent. Between February 2020 and August 2022, the central business districts of the twelve largest U.S. metros saw net population outflows of nine percent and business outflows of sixteen percent, while lower-density areas gained on both counts.¹²

Companies Leaving, Companies Staying

Some financial firms have publicly moved jobs out of the city or announced plans to. JPMorgan Chase’s NYC headcount has dropped from 30,000 a decade ago to 24,000, while its Texas workforce grew from 26,000 to 32,000. CEO Jamie Dimon wrote that the firm is “voting with its feet,” citing New York’s high state and city taxes, and said the trend would “likely continue.”¹³

Apollo Global Management chose Austin as the site of a second headquarters, planning to hire most new employees there and citing both talent considerations and opposition to proposed city tax increases.¹⁴¹⁵ ARK Investment Management closed its New York office in November 2021 and relocated to St. Petersburg, Florida, citing a lower cost of living.¹⁶ Citadel’s Ken Griffin, who moved the hedge fund’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022, pledged to add far more jobs in Miami over the next decade in response to Mayor Mamdani’s tax proposals and filed permits for several hundred thousand square feet of new office space there.¹⁷

At the same time, Wall Street employment in the city hit a record 209,000 workers in 2025, according to the state Labor Department. Three new office towers are planned on Park Avenue, and JPMorgan itself is building a $3 billion, 60-story headquarters for about 10,000 employees. Park Avenue’s vacancy rate sits at seven percent, and the newest office buildings there are 96 percent occupied.¹⁸

Even Citadel is developing a tower at 350 Park Avenue projected to cost over $6 billion and create more than 15,000 permanent jobs. American Express announced a new lower Manhattan headquarters in February 2026, and Bank of America signed a 20-year commitment to its NYC office space in March 2026.¹⁹¹⁷ RXR CEO Scott Rechler told reporters that financial service tenants are growing so fast that they consistently need more space when leases expire.¹⁸²⁰²¹

The Tax Fight Under Mayor Mamdani

The exodus debate sharpened after Zohran Mamdani took office. Facing a budget gap his administration initially pegged at $12.6 billion over two years, Mamdani proposed a package of tax increases rather than cuts.²²

A two-percentage-point surcharge on the city personal income tax for individuals earning $1 million or more, raising the top city rate from 3.876 percent to 5.88 percent. Combined with the state’s 10.9 percent top rate, the total state-and-city marginal rate would reach 16.8 percent before federal taxes. The proposal is projected to raise about $3 billion annually and would affect roughly 34,000 households.²³
An increase in the city’s corporate tax rate from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent, targeting fewer than 1,000 large corporations and projected to raise $5 billion per year. Critics warned the combined marginal corporate rate would climb to 22.48 percent.²⁴
A pied-à-terre tax on nonprimary residences valued at $1 million or more, signed into law in May 2026 with initial rates of four to 6.5 percent based on assessed value. It is projected to generate $500 million annually.²⁵

Governor Kathy Hochul opposed the personal income and corporate rate increases, saying “we’re not raising taxes in the state of New York” and citing $17 billion in unanticipated Wall Street bonus revenue as sufficient. She supported the pied-à-terre tax but drew a firm line against the other two.²⁶

What It All Means for the City’s Budget

The exodus intersects with a city government under real fiscal pressure. In January 2026, Comptroller Mark Levine projected budget shortfalls of $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2026 and $10.4 billion in fiscal year 2027, the largest late-in-year gaps since the Great Recession. He attributed the deficits primarily to the prior administration’s failure to budget for recurring expenses, not to weak revenues.²⁷

By June 2026, the Citizens Budget Commission projected the gap would grow to $9.8 billion by fiscal year 2030, excluding new labor contracts or programs. The CBC found that 61 percent of the administration’s gap-closing actions were one-time measures or deferrals that did “nothing to stabilize the budget long term,” and called the city’s $100 million general reserve “virtually no budget cushion.”²⁸

So far the revenue picture has held up better than the population numbers might suggest. The Comptroller’s office reported that the city’s personal income tax collections in September 2025 were 39.7 percent higher in nominal terms and 13.1 percent higher in inflation-adjusted terms than in December 2019. Income growth among residents who stayed has outweighed the revenue lost to departures.⁸ But that resilience depends on continued prosperity among top earners, and the CBC noted that spending growth of 6.8 percent annually from fiscal year 2021 through 2026 has outpaced revenue growth of 5.2 percent.⁷

Housing, Schools, and the Broader Value Proposition

The exodus is not just about the wealthy. The CBC’s April 2026 tracker reported that departures now span all income, race, ethnicity, and age groups. Asking rents in the city are rising at 3.8 percent annually, roughly double the pre-pandemic rate, and are 15.2 percent higher than before the pandemic. Public school enrollment has dropped by 157,900 students over the past decade. The city spends $42,000 per student, twice the national average, yet nearly half of its schools now enroll fewer than 400 students.³

Property taxes have added pressure. Average annual property taxes per unit reached record highs in the 2025–2026 cycle: $9,578 for co-ops and $15,134 for condos, both up substantially from pre-pandemic levels. Experts have described the compounding hikes as “unsustainable” for residents on fixed incomes.²⁹

The CBC recommended a focus on fiscal stability, housing production through zoning reforms like City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, and quality-of-life improvements. The broad-based nature of the domestic outmigration, its report concluded, means the city needs to become “more magnetic” to families, businesses, and workers across the income spectrum.⁷

1
NYC Department of City Planning. New York City Population Estimates and Trends
2
The New York Times. NYC Census Population Data
3
Citizens Budget Commission. CBC Releases Competitive NYC Value Proposition Tracker
4
Empire Center. New York’s Population Is Struggling to Recover
5
New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. Migration Data
6
News10. New York Outmigration Trends
7
Citizens Budget Commission. Competitive NYC
8
NYC Comptroller. The NYC Personal Income Tax Before and After the Pandemic
9
National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Millionaires Leave If You Tax Them
10
Fiscal Policy Institute. Who Is Leaving
11
Vital City NYC. Mamdani Tax Increase Millionaire Exodus Fears
12
Congressional Research Service. Economic Development Implications of Remote Work in the Post-Pandemic Environment
13
eFinancialCareers. JPMorgan Texas
14
Financial Times. Apollo Selects Austin for Second Headquarters
15
New York Post. Apollo Picks Austin, Texas for Second US Headquarters
16
CNBC. Cathie Wood Says Exodus From High-Cost Cities Will Push Down Inflation
17
CNBC. Mamdani Ken Griffin NYC Miami Tax
18
The City. Wall Street Tax the Rich Employment Exodus Economy
19
CNBC. Mayor Zohran Mamdani New York Office Real Estate Market
20
Avison Young. Manhattan Office Market Report
21
NYC Comptroller. NYC’s Office Market: Doom Loop or Boom Loop
22
Politico. Simmering Tax Hike Debate Thickens Between Hochul and Mamdani
23
The New York Times. Mamdani Tax the Rich
24
New York Post. Mamdani’s Corporate Tax Push Could Cause Exodus to Jersey
25
CNBC. New York Mamdani Pied-à-Terre Tax Passes
26
NY1. Hochul Downplays Mamdani’s Ask for Tax Hikes
27
NYC Comptroller. Comptroller Levine Projects Budget Shortfall
28
amNewYork. Budget Watchdogs Crisis Mamdani Budget
29
Habitat Magazine. Property Tax Assessments Record High