When we imagine people who relocate, certain images come to mind. The ambitious young professional chasing opportunity. The retiree heading to warmer climates. The refugee fleeing hardship. These stereotypes shape how we think about migration—and they're mostly wrong.

The actual data on who moves tells a different story. Migration isn't random, but it doesn't follow the patterns most people expect. Understanding who really relocates—and who stays put—reveals something fundamental about how societies actually work.

Here's the demographic truth: your likelihood of moving drops dramatically after your mid-twenties. Migration rates peak sharply between ages 18 and 29, then decline steadily for the rest of life. This pattern holds across virtually every country and time period demographers have studied.

The reasons aren't mysterious when you think about them. Young adults move for college, first jobs, and romantic partners. They have fewer possessions, weaker local ties, and higher tolerance for disruption. A 23-year-old can fit their life in a sedan. A 45-year-old has a mortgage, kids in school, and a spouse whose career matters too.

What surprises many people is how little older adults move, even when they could. Retirees relocating to Florida or Arizona make headlines precisely because they're unusual. Most people over 65 stay exactly where they are. The 'footloose retiree' is statistically rare—but memorable enough to distort our mental model of who actually migrates.

Takeaway

Migration is fundamentally a young person's game. The window for major geographic moves is much narrower than most people realize—roughly one decade of life accounts for the majority of long-distance relocations.

Education creates a stark divide in who moves. People with college degrees are roughly twice as likely to relocate across state or national boundaries as those without. This gap has actually widened over recent decades, not narrowed.

The mechanism is partly about opportunity. Educated workers compete in national and international job markets. A software engineer in Ohio might find their best opportunity in Seattle. A factory worker's opportunities cluster locally. But it's also about psychology and social networks—college itself often involves geographic separation from home, normalizing the idea that opportunity exists elsewhere.

This creates a demographic feedback loop with real consequences. Educated people cluster in certain cities and regions. Those places attract more educated people. Meanwhile, communities losing their college graduates struggle to attract replacements. The geographic sorting by education level reshapes everything from housing markets to voting patterns to which communities have viable schools and hospitals.

Takeaway

Educational attainment doesn't just affect income—it fundamentally shapes whether someone sees geographic mobility as a realistic option. College creates movers; its absence tends to create stayers.

The biggest predictor of staying put isn't income, education, or job satisfaction. It's family ties. People with children move less. People with aging parents nearby move less. People with siblings, cousins, and childhood friends in the area move dramatically less than those without these anchors.

These constraints are largely invisible in how we discuss migration. Economic models treat workers as units of labor that should flow toward opportunity. But humans are embedded in webs of obligation, affection, and mutual support. Moving for a better job might mean your mother no longer has anyone to drive her to medical appointments.

The family constraint also explains demographic patterns that otherwise seem puzzling. Why don't more people leave economically struggling regions? Often because their entire support system—the people who would help with childcare, lend money in emergencies, or simply provide companionship—exists in that one place. The rational economic choice and the rational human choice frequently diverge.

Takeaway

Migration decisions aren't made by individuals—they're made by people embedded in family systems. The question isn't 'should I move?' but 'can my entire web of relationships survive this move?'

Migration patterns reveal something important: most people aren't nearly as mobile as our economic models assume. We're anchored by age, education, and especially by the people we love. Geographic mobility is concentrated among a specific demographic slice—young, educated, and relatively unattached.

This has implications for everything from housing policy to rural revitalization efforts. Programs designed to attract workers often fail because they're fighting demographic gravity. Understanding who actually moves—and why—is the first step toward policies that work with human nature rather than against it.