El Pasoans who move away are most likely to head to other counties in Texas or in nearby states where wages are significantly higher, according to migration data from the Internal Revenue Service.
The most popular destinations for people leaving El Paso include neighboring Doña Ana County in New Mexico, the Phoenix area, and major Texas cities such as San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston.
El Paso Matters analyzed IRS migration data from 2021 to 2023, the most recent years available. The data includes the number of tax returns, with numbers of dependents and income levels, for people who filed in a county one year but in a different county the next year.
The top destinations for El Pasoans generally offer significantly higher private sector wages than El Paso, which more than offset the higher cost of living in those counties, an El Paso Matters analysis shows.
As El Paso policymakers look for ways to retain families already here, and attract them from elsewhere, the region’s wage structure continues to be a major barrier.
On average, about 32,300 people a year moved from El Paso to another county in the United States in those three years, and about 29,400 people moved to El Paso annually from another county. The net result was a loss of more than 8,700 people over those three years, based on the number of dependents declared on tax returns.
El Paso County’s population has seen little growth since 2013, and declined in 2025, in part because far more people are moving out of the county to other U.S. communities than are moving in.
SEE ALSO: El Paso County loses more than 2,000 residents amid falling immigration and birth rates
More than a quarter of El Pasoans who moved between 2021 and 2023 went to 10 counties in the United States, according to the IRS data. Those counties have been among the top destinations for El Pasoans for a number of years, according to the IRS.
The IRS tracks migration at the county level. The major cities in the counties that draw the largest number of El Pasoans are Las Cruces (Doña Ana County), San Antonio (Bexar County), Phoenix (Maricopa), Colorado Springs (El Paso County, Colorado), Fort Worth (Tarrant County), Houston (Harris County), Austin (Travis County), Dallas (Dallas County), Odessa (Ector County) and Alamogordo (Otero County).
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For all of those counties, El Paso was a net loser in population migration – more people moved out of El Paso than moved in.
Those same counties generally also provided the largest numbers of people moving to El Paso. The exception is Los Angeles County in California, which had 2,055 people move to El Paso over the three years, while also seeing 1,208 people move there from El Paso. Los Angeles is the only county in the country that was a large net exporter of people to El Paso between 2021 and 2023, according to the IRS data.
The largest county for migration to and from El Paso County has long been Doña Ana County in New Mexico, which is immediately adjacent and includes El Paso suburbs such as Anthony, Sunland Park and Santa Teresa.
El Paso is almost four times larger than Doña Ana County, so the net negative migration number can be a bit misleading. About 1% of Dona Ana’s population moved to El Paso in those three years, while about 0.3% of El Paso’s population moved to Doña Ana County.
Put another way, a Doña Ana County resident was more than three times as likely to move to El Paso than the other way around.
Much of El Paso’s migration each year is tied to Fort Bliss, which has almost 37,000 soldiers plus dependents. Soldiers often are sent to new assignments every two or three years.
Two of the top migration areas for El Paso – San Antonio and Colorado Springs – are home to large Army installations.
Impact of economics on migration
People move from one region to another for a variety of reasons. But research shows that job opportunities and lifestyle issues – including cost of living – are significant factors. A desire to be close to family also is a common reason for moving.
According to economic data, El Paso has a lower cost of living than the counties that are the most common destinations for people moving from here. But those counties generally offer higher pay.
El Paso for decades has lagged well behind the state and national levels for average weekly wage for private sector jobs. In the first quarter of this century, El Paso has consistently lost ground in private sector wages compared to state and national averages.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the most frequent destinations for El Pasoans moving out generally have private sector wages higher than El Paso – in most cases, significantly higher.
The cost of living varies widely among U.S. counties, so people have to take that into account when deciding whether to move – and where.
Cost of living can be measured in a number of ways. The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute has built a measure of what it costs in metropolitan areas to maintain what it calls “a modest but adequate lifestyle.” That means a standard of living that covers basic needs and allows a family to live with stability and dignity, but without luxuries or substantial extras. For this analysis, El Paso Matters is using EPI’s numbers for a family with two parents and two children.
On the surface, El Paso County, Texas, appears to have a lower cost of living than most U.S. metro areas. The costs for a modest but adequate lifestyle for a family of four in El Paso is less than in the counties with the largest movement to and from El Paso. (Otero County, New Mexico, isn’t included in EPI’s data because it’s not considered a metropolitan area.)
But relative to income, the cost of a modest but adequate lifestyle is much harder to attain in El Paso than in the counties that attract the most El Pasoans.
One example: almost 54% of El Paso County renters paid 30% or more of their income to rent and utilities in 2025, which is considered to be “cost burdened,” above the national rate of 49%, according to a recent study by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. More than 27% of El Paso renters were classified as “severely cost burdened,” meaning they paid more than half their income to rent and utilities, above the national rate of 26%.
When deciding whether to move to another city or county, people have to take into account the income they can make, and the cost of living differences between areas. These are highly individualized choices. But averages tell a compelling story.
The cost of modest but adequate lifestyle is about 31% less on average in El Paso than in the places that have attracted the largest number of movers from El Paso in recent years. But the average private sector wage in El Paso – just over $900 a week in the most recent information from 2025 – is 56% lower than in those other counties.
Another way to look at the combined impact of wages and cost of living is to determine the percentage of the average private sector wage a family with two adults and two children needs to live a modest but adequate lifestyle. It is far more difficult to build that lifestyle in El Paso and Doña Ana counties than in the other counties that draw people from El Paso.
A couple with two children in El Paso County has to earn about twice the county’s average private sector wage between them to maintain a modest but adequate lifestyle for their family. In Doña Ana County, the couple would need to earn about 2½ times the average private sector wage to do so.
The only other place with frequent movement with El Paso County that has a percentage nearly that high is Colorado Springs.
An El Paso couple with two children moving to Houston (Harris County) would need to find jobs totaling 1.2 times that region’s average private sector wage to create a modest but adequate lifestyle. That is likely an easier task for many than finding jobs in El Paso totaling two times this area’s average wage.
And about property taxes …
No one likes taxes. And in El Paso, like all of Texas, that frustration falls on property taxes, because the state doesn’t have an income tax.
In choosing where to live, taxation is undoubtedly a factor for many people. It is an important part of the cost of living.
It’s common on El Paso social media to hear that people are leaving El Paso because of high property taxes. And undoubtedly, some people have decided to move, especially to nearby communities in New Mexico, when they decide the combination of income and property taxes there is significantly less than property tax alone in El Paso. (Although they are moving to a county that has, on average, a higher cost of living than El Paso).
It’s important to remember that someone in Doña Ana County is three times more likely to move to El Paso than the other way around. That’s an indication that El Paso’s property tax isn’t a significant factor in the vast majority of migration decisions between the two counties.
It’s difficult to compare tax situations between El Paso and counties in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, because those states have both income and property taxes. The tax impact is dependent on individual income and property values.
But we can compare the tax situations of El Paso County and the other counties in Texas where we have high levels of movement.
According to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization, the Texas counties drawing the greatest number of El Pasoans have higher median property tax bills than El Paso County. That’s because home values in those communities, an important component of property tax calculations, are significantly higher than El Paso.
This data suggests that while property taxes can be part of the broader cost-of-living question for people considering a move, they aren’t by themselves a significant driver of migration decisions.
Wages, and their relation to cost of living, appear to be the most significant factor for people deciding to leave El Paso.
The post Where El Pasoans are moving, and what those destinations offer appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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