We’ve collected all our work on Virginia’s changing demography in one place; find it here.
Third of a three-part series. Find part one here and part two here.
Richmond is becoming more like Fairfax County.
Not politically — although maybe that, too — but demographically.
Migration data released by the Internal Revenue Service (which tracks where people file their tax returns) shows an uptick in the number of people moving out of Fairfax County and into the Richmond metro.
The data also shows a smaller, but still significant trend: The Roanoke Valley now attracts more new residents from Fairfax County than it loses to the state’s most populous county.
I want to be careful in how I present this data because there’s a lot of nuance involved.
The IRS data is separate from Census Bureau data. In some ways, it might be better — it’s based on the hard data of tax returns rather than a head count or some statistical estimate. On the other hand, the IRS data runs several years behind the Census Bureau (this new data is for 2023), and it only captures those who file tax returns (or who are listed as dependents on someone else’s tax returns), so it doesn’t include everybody — although ideally it comes pretty close.
To state the obvious: Fairfax County is important because it’s the state’s largest locality and sits at the core of Northern Virginia, which accounts for 42% of the state’s tax revenue. As I always point out, rural schools depend on the state for most of their revenue; Northern Virginia — and specifically Fairfax County — is where a lot of that comes from. What happens in Fairfax has an impact on the wallets of taxpayers across the state.
We’ve previously written about census data that shows Fairfax County, which has been gaining population since the 1830s, is now losing population because of a large net out-migration. This is still true, but the IRS data shines more light on just how it’s happening.
According to the IRS, fewer people are moving out of Fairfax County than at any time since 2015. The number of people who moved out in 2023 was 76,453, down from 80,532 the previous year and especially down from the 118,432 who moved out in 2017.
The reason that Fairfax County is seeing net out-migration — and a widening gap in that net out-migration — is because fewer people are moving into the county. Whether that’s because high housing prices are keeping people out, or it’s part of the national decline in people moving, or a combination of reasons, is beyond the scope of this data. All we can say for certain is that the number of people moving into Fairfax County each year has dropped from 99,162 in 2017 to 67,280 in 2023. You’ll notice that when it comes to people moving in and out, Fairfax has had net out-migration for some time now; what’s been making up the difference is births outnumbering both deaths and out-migration, but the birth rate is declining. If you want more on that sort of thing, see the previous demographic columns collected on our demographics page.
All this is context for what follows.
About 55% of those moving out of Fairfax County move some place outside Virginia. That figure has been pretty consistent for years. For our purposes today, I’m going to focus on the other 45% who move elsewhere in Virginia.
Most moves aren’t very far. In 2023, of the people moving out of Fairfax County, 69.9% moved elsewhere in Northern Virginia. However, that’s lower than it has been. Back in 2005, Fairfax County saw 76.9% of its in-state movers go elsewhere in Northern Virginia.
Put another way, a growing percentage of people who move out of Fairfax County, but remain in-state, are choosing to live somewhere other than Northern Virginia.
So where are they going? Increasingly, the Richmond metro.
Here’s how the numbers have changed over the years:
These numbers are just for the city of Richmond, but we see similar trends in suburban localities, just a little less dramatic.
Chesterfield County has gone from receiving 270 people from Fairfax in 2005 to 469 in 2023. Henrico County has gone from 343 to 451. Hanover County has gone from 76 to 102.
There has been no other part of the state that has seen such a jump in the number of people moving in from Fairfax County. Other parts of the state seeing a lot of migration from Fairfax County, notably the Shenandoah Valley and upper Piedmont, have been remarkably consistent over the years. It’s the Richmond metro that has seen the increase. That shouldn’t be terribly surprising; the Richmond metro is now the fastest-growing part of the state, so it’s obviously gaining them from somewhere, and it makes sense that quite a few would come from a big (and expensive) metro area just a few hours to the north.
There is one other part of Virginia that has seen some changes in terms of its migration from Fairfax County — that’s Roanoke County. The overall numbers haven’t changed that much, but they’ve tilted slightly enough to make this difference. In the 12 years from 2007 to 2018, more people moved out of Roanoke County and into Fairfax County than the other way around. In the five years from 2019 to 2023, four of those five years have seen just the opposite — more people moving out of Fairfax County and into Roanoke County.
Roanoke — the city — has pretty consistently been a Fairfax-attractor. In 14 of the last 19 years for which we have data, Roanoke has had more people move in from Fairfax than move out to Fairfax.
Because the IRS doesn’t release data when the numbers get small — and therefore more identifiable — we don’t have data for every locality in the state, just the bigger ones.
Still, this is what we know: More Fairfax County residents are moving to the Richmond area, and the Roanoke Valley is now on the plus side of in-migration from Fairfax County — and overall, a greater share of Fairfax movers are choosing to live somewhere outside Northern Virginia.
In the recent special election on redistricting, the “no” side put up signs across parts of rural Virginia that declared “Don’t Fairfax Me.” The election results speak for themselves, but demographically, many parts of Virginia are getting Fairfaxed.
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