California Exodus 2026: What the U-Haul Data Really Says

By Daniel Okafor · Published August 26, 2026

U-Haul ranks California second in the country for Gen Z arrivals and dead last overall. Both are true. What the state's own numbers say, and where a young mover can actually afford to land in the Bay Area.

A rented moving truck parked outside postwar bungalows on a San Leandro street, one of the more affordable places young Bay Area movers land.

U-Haul's midyear report ranks California the second-best state in the country for net Gen Z arrivals. The same company, eight months earlier, ranked California 50th out of 50 for the sixth year in a row. Neither number is wrong. They are measuring different things, and the space between them is where the actual story about who is moving to the Bay Area lives.

The short answer: young people really are a bigger share of the people moving in, California is still losing more residents to other states than it gains, and the one Bay Area place where the turn shows up in hard numbers is San Francisco, whose median sale price climbed 16.8 percent in twelve months.

Two true things

California ranked No. 2 for Gen Z and No. 3 for Millennials in U-Haul's July 29, 2026 midyear report, and did not appear in the top ten for Gen X or Boomers at all. The San Francisco Bay Area ranked fourth among all U.S. metros for both younger cohorts.
California still lost 288,600 residents on net to other states in the year ending January 1, 2026, and the state's population fell by 54,000, its first annual decline since the pandemic rebound.
The share of Californians aged 18 to 25 who left the state rose from 14 percent in 2014 to 23 percent in 2025, which is the exact opposite of what the U-Haul headline implies.

What U-Haul actually counted

U-Haul counts one-way equipment transactions. A truck, trailer or box rented in one state and dropped off in another. Net arrivals minus net departures, sorted by the renter's generation, across roughly 2.5 million one-way transactions a year. The midyear report covers July 2025 through June 2026.

It is an ordinal ranking and nothing else. U-Haul publishes no magnitudes, so there is no way to say how many Gen Z movers California netted, only that it netted more than 48 other states. The company's own disclaimer says the rankings may not correlate directly to population or economic growth. That sentence is doing a lot of quiet work and almost nobody quotes it.

Why a truck company is the wrong instrument for this particular claim

The standard critique of moving-company migration data, written by economist Lyman Stone in 2016 and still the one everyone cites, is that it undercounts the young. Movers, he wrote, "tend to be young, lower-income, renters," and a full-service van line does not serve those people. So van-line data skews old and rich.

Run that argument on U-Haul and it flips, and the flip is the problem. A do-it-yourself box truck is what you rent when you are 24 and cannot afford movers. U-Haul structurally over-samples exactly the cohort this story is about. Which makes it the weakest available evidence for a claim about the age composition of movers, not the strongest. If Gen Z shows up disproportionately in truck-rental data, that may be telling you about who rents trucks.

There is a second blind spot. California Policy Lab found that of every 20 Bay Area residents who move, 11 stay inside their own county and only 3 leave the state. Interstate one-way rentals cannot see the 11. And truck availability itself moves the number, because one-way pricing is set partly by where U-Haul needs its fleet repositioned.

What California's own numbers say

The Department of Finance put California at 39,593,000 people as of January 1, 2026, down 54,000 from a year earlier. The composition matters more than the total: net domestic out-migration of 288,600, net international migration of 126,400, and a natural increase of 108,200. DOF's own read is that without the federal restrictions on legal immigration the state would have grown by about 66,000. The decline is an immigration story, not an exodus story.

At the county level, every core Bay Area county was still losing residents to the rest of the country as of DOF's July 2025 component estimates.

Bay Area county	Net domestic migration, year to July 2025	Population change, year to Jan 2026
San Francisco	-2,061	+0.1 percent, to 845,658
Santa Clara	-13,009	+0.2 percent, to 1,932,468
Alameda	-12,308	-0.1 percent, to 1,666,136
San Mateo	-3,721	flat, at 748,182
Contra Costa	-7,940	-0.3 percent, to 1,163,891

Only San Francisco and Santa Clara grew, and both grew only because births and international arrivals outran domestic losses. San Francisco's domestic loss of 2,061 is also the smallest in the region by a wide margin, at roughly a sixth of Alameda County's on a population barely half the size. That is the signal.

San Francisco is where the turn shows up in prices

California Policy Lab's July 2026 Bay Area report found that San Francisco has had more arrivals than departures since the middle of 2024. Prices agree. San Francisco's median sale price ran from $1.85 million in August 2025 to $2.16 million in July 2026, a 16.8 percent climb and the steepest twelve-month move of any Bay Area city we track.

Nothing else in the region did that. Oakland's median was $974,220 in July 2026, essentially flat against $977,450 a year earlier, after bottoming at $785,180 in March. San Jose went from $1.65 million to $1.63 million. So the recovery is not regional. It is one city, and mostly it is the city with the AI hiring.

Which produces the awkward part. If young movers are returning and they are concentrating in San Francisco, they are arriving into the most expensive housing market in the country at the moment it is reaccelerating. A market that goes up 16.8 percent in a year is not a market welcoming first-time buyers.

Where a young mover can actually land

This is the question the migration coverage never gets to. If you are 28, you have a Bay Area offer, and you would rather buy than rent into a market at $6,000 for a two-bedroom, what can you actually reach? The honest answer sits in a narrow band in southern Alameda County.

Neighborhood	Overall score	Safety score	Median price, July 2026
Cherryland, Hayward	3.3 of 5	4.4 of 5	$792,360
Washington Manor, San Leandro	3.4 of 5	3.7 of 5	$850,480
Bonaire, San Leandro	3.7 of 5	4.9 of 5	$858,560
Marina Faire, San Leandro	3.5 of 5	4.5 of 5	$904,930
Fairway Park, Hayward	3.5 of 5	4.6 of 5	$976,630

Read the first and third rows together. Bonaire in San Leandro scores 3.7 out of 5 overall with a 4.9 on safety at a median of $858,560, which beats Oakland's citywide score of 2.6 by more than a full point while costing $116,000 less than Oakland's citywide median. That is not a marginal difference. It is the single best score-to-price trade in the East Bay right now, and it is available because San Leandro is unfashionable rather than because anything is wrong with it.

The floor under this band is real and worth naming. Go below roughly $790,000 in the East Bay and the quality scores fall off hard, into the 1.4 to 2.6 range in deep East Oakland. Between about $790,000 and $980,000 you can still get a neighborhood scoring 3.3 or better with strong safety numbers. Below it, mostly you cannot. If price is the constraint, the best-value ranking for the East Bay is the more useful list to work from than the cheapest one.

What this does and does not mean

It does mean the composition of California migration has genuinely shifted by age. Boomers and Gen X are leaving in numbers that put four southeastern states at the top of U-Haul's list, and younger movers are not. It means San Francisco specifically has turned, and its prices confirm it independently.

It does not mean the exodus is over. The 18-to-25 departure rate is climbing, not falling. It does not mean young people are winning the affordability fight, because Policy Lab found that Bay Area residents who leave the state land in neighborhoods where median home values are $687,000 lower and are 48 percent more likely to own a home after seven years. People who leave are, on the whole, doing fine. And it does not mean a U-Haul ranking should ever be the load-bearing number in a housing decision.

Softening is the right verb. Reversing is not.

The follow-up questions

Is the California exodus over in 2026?

No, but it has slowed. California lost 288,600 residents on net to other states in the year to January 2026, well below the 2021 and 2022 peaks. The state's overall population fell 54,000, and the Department of Finance attributes that to reduced legal immigration rather than to more people leaving.

Is San Francisco growing again?

Yes, barely, and it is the only Bay Area county besides Santa Clara that grew in the year to January 2026, up 0.1 percent to 845,658. California Policy Lab found more arrivals than departures in the city since mid-2024, and the median sale price rose 16.8 percent over the twelve months to July 2026.

How accurate is U-Haul migration data?

It is a real dataset and a poor population estimate. It counts one-way rental transactions rather than people, publishes ranks rather than magnitudes, misses every in-state move, and over-represents younger, lower-income, do-it-yourself movers. U-Haul itself says the rankings may not correlate directly to population growth. Treat it as corroboration, never as the primary source.

Where do people who leave the Bay Area actually go?

Mostly not far. California Policy Lab found that 11 of every 20 Bay Area movers stay in their own county and only 3 leave California. Those who do leave the state land where median home values are about $687,000 lower, take incomes roughly 8 percent lower, and end up more likely to own.

The practical version

If you are moving to the Bay Area this year, the migration headlines do not change what you should do. They just remove one excuse for delay, because the market you are entering has more competition in it than it did in 2023. Our data-driven guide to moving to the Bay Area covers the mechanics, and if the budget is the binding constraint, start instead with the cheapest Bay Area places that still score well on safety. Pick the neighborhood before the listing. A U-Haul ranking cannot tell you whether you will want to stay, and staying is the part that decides whether the move worked.