In September, Lydia DePillis at The New York Times cited data from EIG in her story about the patchy recent history of relocation incentive programs, which offer individuals and families grants or other compensation for moving to a community.
What our data shows is that many small town and rural communities are finally enjoying some wind in their sails to support revitalization efforts, as population growth in the nation’s least populous areas finally turned positive in 2020 — a small silver lining of the pandemic.1
The use of relocation incentives surged in the early 2020s. A few years in, however, several pioneers mentioned in the Times piece have abandoned their programs after local leaders determined that their opportunity cost was too high. Programs were not particularly expensive, but local governments need to be able to justify every dollar they spend, and the incentives simply attracted too few permanent new residents to be worth continuing.
And yet interest in relocation incentives is likely to remain high in this age of declining birth rates, falling international migration, and slowing domestic migration. In this piece we analyze recent trends in county-level population growth and dig deeper into the uneven population recovery in rural areas. We then discuss why population loss matters and can leave communities searching for tools to regain some control over their demographic trajectory. We finish by exploring the costs and benefits of relocation incentives, which can give communities a leg-up when structured well but are ultimately zero sum in nature.
Two big things
Let’s start with some broader context. There are two major developments in county population trends over the past several years:
Slowdown in large urban county population growth. The large urban county population slowdown has now lasted about a decade. Big cities had enjoyed the strongest population growth of any category coming out of the Great Recession, but their advantage started to fade by 2016. The pandemic then hit large urban counties hard (remember the donut hole?) before they regained some of that lost ground as international migration picked up from 2022 to 2024. But then came the 2025 immigration crackdown, and big cities fell back to their low population growth trendline.
Shift to population growth for rural areas. The other big reversal, this one in a positive direction, is for rural areas. After declining and then stagnating for much of the 2010s, rural population growth accelerated in 2021 and remains elevated compared to pre-pandemic growth rates. As illustrated in the figure below, the rural population increased by 2.1 percent from 2019 to 2025, up 2.3 percentage points from the six years prior. This rebound extended to small-town areas as well, where growth rates improved by 1.2 percentage points to 3.3 percent from 2019 to 2025.
One finer point
The pandemic-era tailwinds did not reach all rural areas, though.
Rural portions of metropolitan areas drive most of the post-pandemic rural population growth. Despite making up roughly one-quarter of America’s rural population in 2019, rural counties within metro areas account for over two-thirds of total rural population growth since then.
Metro rural counties grew 5.5 percent from 2019 to 2025 — in line with suburban counties — while non-metro rural counties grew just 0.9 percent during the same period. Non-metro rural areas did reverse their long-term population decline after 2020, but their population remains below 2010 levels.
Age and place
Over 55s are driving rural population growth in rural counties both within and outside metro areas. This was true before the pandemic, and it remains true after. What is different is that rural areas closer to urban centers now enjoy outright growth in younger segments of the population, In addition, the outright loss of young and working age residents in rural counties outside metro areas slowed dramatically, but not sufficiently to result in a return to growth in these demographic groups.
There are clear regional differences in the age groups driving rural population growth, as the below map shows. In the Mountain West and East Texas, prime working age adults helped power the rural resurgence. In the Northern Great Lakes and Southeast, the over-55 cohort dominates.
Why this matters
Trends in population growth and decline carry major economic and social implications. Population decline in particular matters because it often makes the work of economic development harder. As our colleagues Sarah Eckhardt and Adam Ozimek have written:
Declining populations often coincide with shrinking economic opportunities, aging workforces, and the erosion of vital local services such as hospitals, public schools, and infrastructure built for larger populations…
…One of the most important consequences of population loss is lack of dynamism. A growing body of scholarship shows that demographic decline is linked to lower rates of business formation. Fewer residents doesn’t only mean fewer entrepreneurs, but also a smaller labor force. Both issues make it less likely that a community will be able to generate startups [and attract investment]…
…Another unavoidable result of demographic decline and lack of investment is that the tax base erodes. This in turn causes other deteriorations in quality of life. Population loss can also lead to local vacancies as some neighborhoods empty out and businesses shutter without replacement.
In short, local population decline is often a trap from which communities struggle to break free.
So what’s a community to do?
Given the momentous implications of population growth, communities have an interest in shaping their demographic trajectory.
Communities basically have two levers under their control to influence population growth: retention and attraction.
To retain residents, places need to maintain a strong value proposition: a high quality of life supported by strong job opportunities with a competitive cost of living. For many large urban counties, the pandemic delivered a negative shock to this proposition, with quality of life deteriorating just as strong job opportunities geographically decoupled to other places with the rise of remote work. The Wall Street Journal recently called out Seattle and Washington, DC, as two cities that have bucked the wider demographic trends affecting large urban counties by maintaining their appeal for families, in particular, with a range of quality schools and cost-competitive housing markets relative to neighboring suburban jurisdictions.
When it comes to attracting new residents, communities can compete passively or actively.
Competing passively involves trading on the same basic value proposition that drives retention — the amenities and opportunities an area offers for a given price (cost of living). Many of the rural areas that boomed during the pandemic found they were newly or increasingly competitive on the merits following the pandemic and remote-work shocks. Sun Belt growth poles have long competed relatively passively on price and quality of life while setting themselves up for success by permitting more housing, too.
Relocation and remote worker incentives represent the newer strategy of competing much more actively on the market, or paying for someone to move. Communities might choose to do this to abate population losses. They might do this to stock the talent pipeline. And they might do this because each prime-age white collar digital nomad offers a tidy, tiny little stimulus to the local economy. Regardless of the motivation, this represents a much more active intervention in the market for residents.
Remotely interested
Relocation incentives are a topic we have thought a lot about. Back in 2021, EIG conducted the first full economic impact analysis of the Tulsa Remote program. Tulsa Remote was an early mover in this space, and the program stood out for three main reasons:
The scale at which the community has tried to attract talent (thousands over only a few years);
The wraparound services the program offers new remoters both to increase the likelihood that incentive recipients stay and to juice each one’s expected local economic multiplier; and
The extent to which the program fits into a broader constellation of local economic development initiatives, all working towards a shared local vision of economic development.
In short, Tulsa combined a people-based incentive with a constellation of other place-based investments to bolster its attractiveness for migrants in an intentional, well-rounded strategy.
As DePillis noted, Tulsa Remote is really the gold standard for these types of programs. Even Tim Bartik — traditionally an economic development incentive skeptic — speaks positively of the program, finding that every $1 it spent attracting a remote worker generated $4 in value for local residents. That compares starkly to the bad deal that most communities get when they pay for companies directly to relocate jobs (which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per job).
Nevertheless, three reflections should inform how communities approach such incentives.
Relocation incentives rest on strong assumptions about the multiplier effect — meaning the wider economic impact that the marginal highly-educated, highly-paid worker brings to a local economy. Increasing an area’s population one person at a time is a slow process, but communities utilizing relocation incentives are typically betting on quality over quantity, aiming to attract highly-educated, high-earning individuals predisposed to start businesses or engage civically. For a state, a remote worker acts much like an export earner, selling their labor to an out-of-state buyer and bringing income, spending, and tax receipts back home.
Any marginal population changes generated by these relocation incentives risk being dwarfed by larger shocks and shifts affecting where Americans live and work. Recall what communities have navigated over the past few years: COVID-era migration shifts catalyzed by the existential push factors of a pandemic and the sudden and widespread adoption of remote work; the surge and then dramatic curtailment of international migration; and the aging of the population and continuous decline in birth rates, which has weakened the contribution of the”natural increase” tailwind to population growth. Even in Tulsa, population growth has flatlined over the past couple of years as events overtake even the best local intentions.
There’s a leaky bucket caveat to local migration policy. On their own, relocation incentives only open a spigot for population inflow; they do nothing to stem the leak at the bottom (residents leaving). That’s why the most effective programs treat these incentives as merely one component of a broader development strategy. Again, this is where Tulsa is due a lot of credit: Tulsa Remote is one element of a whole suite of initiatives to create buzz and spur local economic growth.
Domestic migration is zero sum. You know what isn’t?
Competition across communities is healthy. It forces places to continuously evaluate and invest in the value proposition they offer residents and businesses. But domestic migration is ultimately a zero-sum game. Every in-migrant to one community is an out-migrant from another. The pandemic increased the pool of migrants nationwide, but only temporarily; the domestic migration rate has since fallen back to earth. Americans’ proclivity to move to opportunity remains near its all-time low.
Which is why American communities have long embraced international migration as a demographic lifeline. Immigrants have driven the revitalization of Rust Belt cities and stabilization of rural hamlets. The slowdown in international migration is putting more communities under demographic and economic stress. The crackdown on high-skilled immigration is fiscal lunacy. The negative repercussions will only deepen the longer the slowdown persists.
A proposal such as EIG’s Heartland Visas — a new visa category that jurisdictions staring down demographic decline could opt into — would give locales another tool for taking control of their demographic fates. It would deliver a healthy fiscal bump to communities without poaching talent from their neighbors. And while Heartland Visas might function best in legacy cities where the embers of agglomeration still burn, the tool would be useful in rural areas, too: More than 200,000 immigrants settled in non-metro rural counties between 2021 and 2025, representing more than one-quarter of all net-migration into non-metro rural areas.
Until the window of opportunity for a more enlightened approach to international migration opens again, communities in the market for residents may find worker relocation incentives an increasingly attractive tool. The situation could be worse — they are less expensive and less dubious than chasing smokestacks — but it could be better, too.
See our GitHub with replication code here.
EIG categorizes counties along the urban-rural spectrum using a combination of 2023 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Locale Classifications and 2018-2022 American Community Survey (ACS) Census block population. Rural counties are defined as those where at least 75 percent of the population lives in NCES rural areas, or at least 50 percent lives in NCES rural areas with total ACS county population below 50,000. Our detailed code, data, and methodology can be found here.