Golden State Exodus: Companies Leaving California

Updated October 2025

At the California Policy Center, we launched the California Exodus Project to track the people and businesses leaving the state as well as the factors driving the trend: California’s high tax burden, over-regulation that strangles businesses of all sizes, poor public schools performance and an ever-increasing cost of living to name a few.

And it’s not just working families leaving the state. Major companies are leaving California — moving their headquarters and production facilities to other states — with many of them citing lower tax burdens and fewer regulations as well as employees’ demand. Others are leaving California due to high crime rates and a woke political culture that has become unsustainable.

For the first time in its history, California experienced a loss in population in 2020. The trend continued into 2022, by which time California had lost more than a half-million people in just two years. 

But while California’s extreme COVID policies that shuttered businesses and schools accelerated the California Exodus, the trend existed long before the pandemic. From 2010 through 2023, about 9.2 million people left California for other states, but only 6.7 million people moved to California from other parts of the country. The population shift resulted in California losing a Congressional seat for the first time in its history after the 2020 census.

U-Haul’s annually published data illustrates the migration trends clearly. In 2024, California ranked dead last (50th place) on the moving company’s migration trends list, meaning the state saw the greatest net loss of one-way out-of-state U-Haul trucks. California has ranked 50th on that list for five years in a row going back to 2020, but consistently ranked in the bottom three for several years before then. Meanwhile, Texas and has ranked in the top three states in the U-Haul growth index for the last nine years, and Florida for the past eight out of nine years.

If you have an entry you believe should be added to the tracker, please fill out this form HERE.

You can explore a full version of California Policy Center’s Book of Exoduses, which tracking companies leaving California and notable figures leaving the state Here.