Alaska is losing its residents to Texas, Oregon, Washington state and Florida.
That’s according to 2023 American Community Survey results, an annual demographics survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
From 2022 to 2023, Alaska lost more residents than it gained, continuing a trend that has existed since 2012.
Though Alaska has long led the nation in annual population turnover — typically, about 45,000 people moved both into and out of the state annually, said Alaska Department of Labor demographer Eric Sandberg — “what has changed is that the number leaving is now consistently higher than the number coming in.”
About 35,800 residents left the state between 2022 and 2023, while only about 30,676 arrived, data shows.
In-migration, new residents moving north, has fallen short of out-migration, Alaskans leaving the state, every year since 2012, Dan Robinson, the department’s chief of analysis and research, said at a resource industry conference earlier this month in Anchorage.
“Imagine yourself a store or a restaurant,” Robinson said, needing to constantly attract new customers to replace the ones who stop coming. Failing to replace lost customers is bad for business.
“Something has changed about Alaska’s relative attractiveness,” he said.
“It’s likely complicated,” with no one answer as to why more people leave than move to the state. A shortage of affordable housing and child care services are an issue, but that’s true around the country, not just in Alaska, Robinson said.
Where the net loss of residents really creates problems is in the shortage of working-age residents, the economist said. That pushes employers to bring in more workers from out of state, particularly for low-wage industries like tourism and seafood processing.
An annual report on the Southeast Alaska economy noted that the region has 5,600 fewer working-age residents than it did in 2010, even though the population has held steady.
Last year, those leaving Alaska flocked in highest numbers to Texas, which claimed roughly 4,688 Alaska residents in 2023, according to the data. Next, Oregon took about 3,236 residents, Washington absorbed 3,098, and the furthest state from Alaska — Florida — claimed 2,280 of its former residents.
The “why” is pretty simple, according to state demographer Sandberg. There are fewer young people coming to the state, and those who are already here — a rapidly aging population — are leaving for things like retirement.
Fewer job opportunities and an overall economic downturn, beginning with a statewide recession in the late 2010s, has kept what was once a dependable population boom of adults in their 20s and 30s at a decline, Sandberg said.
From 2015 to 2020, Alaska lost about 700 more people in their early 20s every year than it gained, according to Sandberg’s research.
“There’s generally been a pattern that we attract young people and older people leave more often than come,” Sandberg said. “(A) high baby boomer population … has lifted up that number of people leaving, just by how many boomers we have approaching retirement age.”
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