Migration Trends v3.2 - Cities and Towns

Check out the new addition of cities and towns aggregation level✨

Announcing a new (6th) geographic aggregation for Migration: Cities & Towns

As of the June ’23 edition of the Migration Trends Feed, we are adding a new and significant capability - Analysis of migration and population changes at the levels of Cities & Towns. This is a 6th aggregation (in addition to State, DMA, CBSA, County, and ZCTA), and is geographically between the ZCTA and County levels.
The new aggregation is based on the US Census definition of ‘Places’, which is the source of the boundary polygons we use, to calculate Cities & Towns' Migration. A total of just over 22,000 Cities & Towns will be supported by our Migration trends (after having filtered out ones that are too small, eg lacking an adequate panel).
In addition, for each county, we add a special “Non-cities-and-towns Area”, that aggregates all the portions of the county not belonging to any City/Town, to track migrations to those locations (similar to what we’ve been doing for CBSAs). The name of this area is the name of the county + two asterisks. Example: 13307**

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Non-cities-and-towns areas - impact on ab files

It is notable to mention that in the city_town ab files, in lines that describe the “Non-cities-and-towns” areas, there will appear 3 blank cells for the columns of ‘region_code_a_adjusted_population’, ‘percent_migrated_b_to_a’ and ‘percent_migrated_a_to_b’ .

Cities & Towns data is delivered alongside the other geographic aggregations by having 3 more files (Net, a-b, and Metadata) added to the feed. Also, 2 new columns are added to all a-b files containing the a-to-b and b-to-a migration in absolute numbers (in addition to the existing columns where they’re given in terms of % of ‘a’ population)