Net Domestic Migration by County

People move for a lot of reasons: for family, health and retirement among others. Finding economic opportunity is an important driver and one that is encouraged by state and local policy.

Over the past decade, Michigan has started to attract more people. It still is losing people to other states, but those numbers are down.

This map looks at net migration — it calculates how much a county’s population has changed due to people moving in and moving out of it from 2010 to 2016. Oakland and Macomb counties attracted the most people, with Oakland adding 22,936 people, a 1.9 percent gain and Macomb adding 21,223 people, a 2.5 percent gain. Those are neighbors of Wayne County, which lost 104,909 people, a 5.8 percent decline.

It’s not all in one direction, though. According to a different report from the U.S. Census Bureau, which doesn’t align perfectly with the data in the map, from 2010 to 2014, 14,405 people moved from Oakland County to Wayne County. But 20,831 people moved from Wayne to Oakland. In a similar fashion, 5,289 people moved from Macomb County to Wayne County and 13,412 people moved from Wayne to Macomb. That is the equivalent of 38.7 percent of Wayne County’s net out-migration.

The largest gain by proportions came in Grand Traverse County at 4.8 percent and Ottawa County at 3.1 percent.

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