SparkyData

NYC Migration: Who Moves In and Out, Census Microdata

Public-use microdata from the article “Who is leaving New York, and who is arriving”

Not synthetic. Disclosure-protected survey records published by a government statistical agency, cut to the people or households we looked at.

Records
Public-use microdata
Place
New York City
Version
1.7,
Licence
CC BY 4.0; code MIT
Built for
Who is leaving New York, and who is arriving (version 1.7)

New York is not emptying out; it runs a steady exchange with the rest of the country that ends in a loss every year, a net 114,000 people in the year to July 2025. Arrivals are younger and more often graduates than leavers, and on balance the city loses children. Because the domestic loss recurs, births and above all immigration decide whether the city grows, and immigration is what swung.

The article's own data file, microdata cut to what it analyses, and the script that computes every figure in it. Computed from: ACS 2015–2024 one-year PUMS: residents of the five boroughs from the New York file, people who lived in the five boroughs a year earlier from the national file; Census Bureau population estimates Vintage 2020 and Vintage 2025; IRS county migration data 2015-16 to 2022-23; DHS daily shelter census to 3 October 2026; CPS basic monthly files June 2024 to August 2026.

Files

FileRowsSizeWhat it holds
data.csv 217,008 21.4 MB The microdata the article's figures are computed from.
analysis.py 70 KB The script that computes every figure in the article (MIT).

Columns

data.csv: The data (27 columns)

row_id, year, weight, status, borough, origin, origin_region, destination, destination_region, destination_state, age, age_band, sex, race_ethnicity, foreign_born, noncitizen, region_of_birth, region_lived_in_a_year_ago, bachelors_or_higher_25plus, employed_16plus, student_18plus, household_income_2024, income_band, owner, with_children, works_in_nyc, works_from_home. The article and its script define each one.

Sources

Licence and credit

The survey records are the publishing agency's, redistributed as published; the columns we derived are CC BY 4.0; the script is MIT. Public-use microdata are disclosure-protected records derived from survey responses, published by the issuing agency so that no respondent can be identified; synthetic records are generated by SparkyData and correspond to no real person, household or address. Neither may be used to identify anyone.

Credit it as:

SparkyData (2026). NYC Migration: Who Moves In and Out, Census Microdata (version 1.7). Data CC BY 4.0.
https://sparkydata.dev/data/nyc-migration-movers-in-and-out-census-microdata

The article gives the charts, the uncertainty of each comparison and a changelog. Corrections and questions: sparkytech.dev@gmail.com, or see corrections.