Each year, millions of people pack up their belongings and move. A variety of reasons and conditions motivate these moves—life changes, personal and economic opportunities, setbacks and misfortunes. This report provides information about the level of geographical mobility in the United States between 2008 and 2009, along with some sociodemographic characteristics of the people who moved.
The data used in this report come from two different survey collections under - taken by the U.S. Census Bureau. Since the late 1940s, questions on residential mobility have been asked as part of the March supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is now known as the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC). ASEC data provide estimates of geographical mobility in 1-year retrospective periods over the last 6 decades, and these data have been the source of a large, detailed set of tabulations and analyses, some of which are in this report. Many additional data tables are available on the Census Bureau Web site.