Washington, DC’s loss became a gain for the region’s inner suburbs as people between ages 26 and 44 making six-figure salaries left the District during the pandemic.
An analysis by DC concluded that of the 16,000 tax-filing households, or roughly 31,000 people who left, the inner suburbs gained “more than 8,000 taxfiling households and more than $1.2 billion in taxable income.”
“A clear picture emerges: the city’s net loss of taxfilers was concentrated among mid-to-high earners 26-44 years old. The only demographic among which we had a net gain of taxfilers due to migration was younger, lower-income filers less than 35 years old, but especially those less than 26 years old,” the analysis found.
The report does indicate DC saw a population shift, but said change should not be surprising since the adult population before the pandemic was concentrated on those aged 26 to 44, and those who were in the mid-20s and mid-30s in the 2000s and 2010s were part of the city’s population boom.
More than half of those who left earned $100,000 or more, while about 2,724 earned $200,000 or more, the Office of Revenue Analysis found.
In total, the migration out of the nation’s capital resulted in a loss of $3 billion in taxable income.
Maryland’s Prince George’s and Montgomery counties gained the most, followed by Fairfax County and Alexandria.
Fairfax County saw an influx of 1,114 former DC tax filers who brought with them the equivalent of $231 million, while Alexandria gained $146 million from 1,040 former DC tax filers. Th average household income for those going to Fairfax was $137,000 a year, and for Alexandria, it was $115,000.
Loudoun County gained 210 former DC filers who made on average $127,000 a year. The net loss to DC from them was $31 million.
The report said, “Out of all the inner suburbs, Arlington County and Fairfax city were the only counties from which DC had a net gain of taxpayers.”
The gain from Arlington was 87 households between 2019 and 2021. “A note on Arlington: while DC had a total net gain of taxfiling households from there between 2019 and 2021, that total resulted from a net gain in 2020 that outweighed a net loss in 2021. DC also still lost income to Arlington over the two years combined since households leaving DC for Arlington had higher incomes on average than those coming into DC from there,” the analysis said.
Other areas where DC residents moved included Annapolis, Maryland; Denver; and Los Angeles. Those three jurisdictions ended up with 1,344 tax filers who had average household incomes between $135,000 and $111,000.
The report notes that DC lost between 178 and 197 households to the Delaware beaches. Those households had an average income of $293,000 and an estimated loss for the city of $60 million to $62 million. More specifics were not available because the IRS had redacted data DC used.
Feature image of people on the National Mall, stock.adobe.com
For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine’s News newsletter.
