CNBC’s top 10 “best states to live in” lost 58,000 residents last year – bottom 10 gained 211,500
Last week, CNBC placed Minnesota fifth in its “Top States for Business” rankings. Governor Walz took to social media to celebrate:
This ranking is completely bogus. As I noted last week, these rankings of “Top States for Business” are not correlated in any meaningful way with what businesses actually do, such as start themselves or hire people.
CNBC strips out one component of its “Top States for Business” ranking, “Quality of Life,” and bills it as a ranking of “best states to live in.” Let us remind ourselves of what this measures:
Quality of Life (290 points – 11.6%)
As more companies mandate that their employees return to the office, they are also looking for locations that offer the best quality of life. We rate the states on livability factors like per capita crime rates, environmental quality, and healthcare. With studies showing that childcare is one of the main obstacles to employees entering or re-entering the workforce, we consider the availability and affordability of qualified facilities. We look at worker protections, including livable wage policies, paid leave, and rights to organize. We look at inclusiveness in state laws, including protections against discrimination of all kinds, as well as voting rights and secure election systems. And with surveys showing a sizeable percentage of younger workers would not live in a state that bans abortion, we factor reproductive rights in this category as well.
It is, then, a ranking that equates more “liberal” or “progressive” policies with a higher “Quality of Life.”
We might expect a ranking of state’s “Quality of Life” to be somewhat correlated with where people choose to live. Once again, however, CNBC’s ranking fails this basic test.
Figure 1 shows the relationship between CNBC’s “Quality of Life” rankings for 2026 and a state’s rate of domestic in or out-migration in 2024-2025 per 1,000 of the 2024 population taken from the Census Bureau. Not only is the relationship negative – in that the lower your CNBC “Quality of Life” ranking the higher is your rate of domestic in-migration – but the relationship is statistically significant.
Figure 1: Relationship between CNBC’s ‘Quality of Life’ rankings and domestic in-migration
Let us make one last stop on the crazy train. Figure 2 shows the net domestic migration of the top and bottom ranked 11 states on CNBC’s “Quality of Life” ranking for 2024-2025. We see that the top ranked states lost a total of 57,641 residents while the bottom ranked states gained a total of 211,511, nearly four times as many.
Figure 2: Net domestic migration of CNBC’s “best states to live in,” 2024-2025
People, it would seem, are fleeing states with higher qualities of life for states with lower ones. Does that make sense?
There is a serious point to all this. If we accept that CNBC’s “Quality of Life” ranking is simply a measure of how “liberal” or “progressive” a state is in terms of policy, the Census Bureau data show that people are fleeing that model; Americans simply don’t share CNBC’s preferences. As I’ve written before, this population problem for “Blue States” will become a political one, too.