‘Taxes aren’t really high enough for them to be sensitive’: the fears of the wealthy fleeing New York and California were just that

Stop me if you’ve heard it before: Jeff Bezos leaves Washington state for a “billionaire bunker” in Florida .

Fellow Washingtonian Howard Schultz moves from Seattle to Miami as the state advanced a 9.9% tax on income over $1 million .

Add in Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, plus Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison all leaving California , and you have a pretty good hypothesis: raise taxes on the wealthy, and the wealthy leave.

New IRS data suggests otherwise.

According to a Fiscal Policy Institute analysis of IRS Statistics of Income data, the states with the most progressive tax systems have the highest concentration of millionaires per filer in the country.

The number of millionaires within those states (California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C) has also grown since 2010.

New York’s millionaire share rose again in 2023, the most recent year of data available, even after the state raised its rate on incomes over $1 million in 2021.

Florida saw a notable decline in its millionaire share that same year.

“We’re just really not seeing any declines in the millionaire population in New York State,” Emily Eisner, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, told Fortune .

She said millionaire households “simply just aren’t that sensitive to the tax rates in the state” because, for them, “the taxes aren’t really high enough for them to be sensitive to them.” Where it does fall, the tax burden lands hardest on families earning between $100,000 and $500,000 a year.

“It’s tough living in New York City,” Eisner said.

“You’re making a lot of money relative to the population of the United States, but in New York City, you don’t feel rich at all.

You still feel squeezed.” In 2016, New York state’s Department of Taxation and Finance counted 57,126 million-dollar earners, but that grew to 68,068 by 2019, according to an FPI fact sheet .

Then in 2021, when the state raised taxes on those earning over $1 million, the millionaire count jumped 21% to 84,366.