Surprise! Arizona ranked as one of the top retirement states in the US
May 15, 2018, 4:31 AM
(Pixabay photo)
(Pixabay photo)
PHOENIX — To the surprise of precisely no one in the Valley, Arizona ranks as one of the top states where people move when they retire.
Arizona ranks No. 2 on the list, behind Florida.
For three years, SmartAsset analyzed migration data from the U.S. Census Bureau to find the top places retirees move.
The top four in their 2017 and 2018 editions remained the same: Florida, Arizona, North Carolina and South Carolina. In 2016, Florida and Arizona were in the top 2, with South Carolina and Georgia rounding it out.
That’s not all – several Arizona cities have been on SmartAsset’s list of cities people move to when they retire.
Over the last three years, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Peoria and Surprise have all been listed in the top 10 cities to where retirees move.
Half the 2017 edition was made up of Arizona cities – five of them made the list that year.
The number of retirees who moved to the state has increased each year, rising from 18,773 in the first year of the study to 28,614 in the most recent.
This is almost twice as much as the number of North Carolina-bound retirees.
Despite the large lead over North Carolina, Arizona has a giant gap behind Florida. The most recent study found that more than 84,000 retirees moved to the Sunshine State.
In addition to Arizona and Florida, both Carolinas, Georgia, Oregon and Nevada were ranked in the top 10 all three years.
Texas, Idaho and Delaware each made the list twice. Tennessee found a spot in 2016.
