New neighbors? Here are the states and cities they probably moved from

Have you been seeing more U-Haul trucks in your neighborhood this summer?

Since nearly half of all residential moves every year occur between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, there's a good chance you have noticed an influx of these white box trucks.

According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, Phoenix is the nation's fifth largest city, with 1.7 million people as of May. But is the city really growing?

In order to help gauge how much the metro Phoenix area has been growing this year, U-Haul provided data on the most common places new Arizonans are coming from. The moving company analyzed its one-way truck transactions between Jan. 1 and July 1 and reported which states and cities are producing the most new residents to the Valley.

Here's where new residents in metro Phoenix are coming from and how the region's population has changed recently.

Which states are new metro Phoenix residents coming from?

  1. California

  2. Texas

  3. Colorado

  4. Nevada

  5. Washington

  6. New Mexico

  7. Utah

  8. Oregon

  9. Florida

  10. Illinois

Which cities are new metro Phoenix residents coming from?

  1. Los Angeles

  2. Las Vegas

  3. Denver

  4. Dallas/Fort Worth

  5. Albuquerque

  6. Portland, Oregon

  7. El Paso, Texas

  8. Houston

  9. Bay Area, California (San Jose/San Francisco/Oakland)

  10. San Diego

Which Arizona cities are new metro Phoenix residents coming from?

  1. Tucson

  2. Flagstaff

  3. Prescott

  4. Lake Havasu City

  5. Yuma

Is the population in metro Phoenix growing?

Metro Phoenix — which the Census Bureau draws as a composite of Maricopa and Pinal counties — added 49,240 people between July 2022 and July 2023. That’s less than each of the two previous years, during which the region’s population grew by more than 70,000 residents a year.

Maricopa County, which was the nation’s highest-gaining county in 2022, dropped to fourth place last year behind three Texas counties: Montgomery County, Harris County and Collin County (which are in the Houston and Dallas metro areas).

Between 2020 and 2023, Maricopa County’s population grew by 140,812 people — 60% of the state’s total additions across the same time period.

But Maricopa didn’t have the highest growth rate of any Arizona county over the past three years: That honor goes to Pinal County, which grew by 12.6% across the three-year period.

How many people moved to Arizona in 2023?

More people moved to Arizona than moved out in 2023: The state saw positive net domestic and international migration, the census statistics revealed.

But net migration — the number of people who moved into the state minus those who moved out — shrank markedly compared with the two previous years. In both 2020 and 2021, net migration hovered about 90,000 people. In 2023, that figure dropped to about 58,000.

Arizona Republic reporter Sahana Jayaraman contributed to this article.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Here's where people are moving to Phoenix from