Migration Trends

*** To see what's new in the Migration Trends feed, please refer to the Migration Trends v4.0 - Permanent vs. Seasonal

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Use the Placer.ai Migration Trends Data-Feed to analyze people's migration over time for any region in the US. Analyze the net-migration, migration source, and destination, easily aggregated by ZCTA, DMA, CBSA, County, city/town, or State.
Placer’s migration data helps understand population trends and changes across the US. To ascertain a migration, we utilize our extensive roster of panelists and follow home region changes. A migration is defined as when a panelist is assigned a new home region for at least FIVE months. Please note that this differs from the census definition, but will allow a near real-time understanding of the trends in the market. For example, this will identify a student panelist moving to a new location for a semester.

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Important

Please note - migration is defined when a panelist is assigned a new home region for at least FIVE consecutive months. To accurately determine migration, the calculation for a given month takes into account data for those elapsed months. Therefore at any given time a report will reflect parts of the data (in particular - the detailed origins/destinations moves in the AB files) with a latency of 5 months, while others (net migration & population changes) with a latency of 2 months, or up to the month prior to the last full calendar month. e.g. A report delivered in June will reflect net migration & population changes up to the end of April, and origins/destination moves up to the end of January.

Panelist moves lasting 2 to 5 months will be considered as "Seasonal Visitors", and moves of 5 months or more will be considered as affecting "Permanent residents" population.

Files Delivery

Once enabled, files will be uploaded to your cloud bucket (AWS/GCS) or delivered via email (see Delivery Details) once a month.

• Files will be located under this path:
  /export/analytics/migration-trends/monthly/
  • upload date, example: 2020-01-11
• Each delivery includes a folder for each of the following region types: CBSA, DMA, county, citytown, state, ZCTA. In
  each folder: migration[region_type]ab.csv, migration[region_type]net.csv,
  migration[region_type]_metadata.csv
• Delivery is done until the 15th of each month, each delivery includes full data history going back to 2018.
• Each file is GZip compressed

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Data Retention and Usage

Placer's algorithms and data constantly improve, therefore we include all the history in every monthly export. We strongly suggest not to intermix data provided in old exports with new ones, to avoid data anomalies.

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Zipcodes are actually ZCTAs

ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) are generalized areal representations of United States Postal Service (USPS) ZIP Code service areas used by the US Census and are considered a common practice when analyzing Zip code population. For more information see this.

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A Note about MS Excel

In order to display the data correctly, it's recommended to import the file to Excel, rather than opening it. Opening the file with Excel will work too, but some values may be displayed differently than expected (e.g ZCTAs that start with a zero such as '01003' may appear as 1003)

Schema Overview - migration_[region_type]_net.csv

Each row provides monthly net migration results per region type per month.

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Important!

The permanent_residents_population for each month shows the sum of permanent_residents_population for the previous month as well as domestic migration, natural growth and international migration.
For example: The permanent_residents_population for November 2020, will be the permanent_residents_population for Oct 2020 + domestic migration throughout Oct 2020 + natural growth throughout Oct 2020 + international migration throughout Oct 2020.
The permanent_residents_population for January 2018 is used as a baseline.
The total_migration field shows the domestic migration between the named month and the next one. For example:

• The total_migration for November 2020, will include the number of people who migrated between November and December.
• The report for December 2020 will be released in January 2021 and will include the adjusted population up to December 2020. However, the 'total_migration' field will have values until November 2020, representing the migration between November and December.

The latest permanent_residents_population reflects the population counted up to the end of the previous calendar month.

Schema Overview - migration_[region_type]_ab.csv

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Important

Since a migration is defined when a panelist is assigned a new home region for at least 5 months, the _ab files include information no more recent than four months before the last full month. For example: if the feed is generated and delivered in May, it will include Migration data until December.

Each row provides monthly domestic migration results for a pair of source/destination region types and month.

Schema Overview - migration_[region_type]_metadata.csv

Each row includes metadata for a region.

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Note the 'seasonal_magnitude' warning to improve analysis quality.

Schema Sample File

Please find HERE migration trends feed's files with limited data for schema evaluation.