Massachusetts has seen a slight improvement in maintaining residents, but the Bay State remains stuck in the nation’s basement for one-way U-Haul customer transactions.

The Commonwealth ranks 46th in the nation for out-migration on U-Haul’s 2026 Growth Index Report, increasing its performance from 49th in the 2025 study. The rating has stirred debate on what needs to be done for further improvement.

California continues to rank last out of all 50 states for the sixth year in a row, with New York, New Jersey and Illinois also joining Massachusetts in the nation’s bottom five.

U-Haul growth states are ranked by their net gain — or loss — of U-Haul customers over the past year. This stat is calculated by comparing each state’s one-way arrivals that originated in other states with its one-way departures that were destined for other states, using data from more than 24,000 rental locations.

The Bay State’s one-way arrival percentage last year was 48.2% and its departure percentage was 51.8%.

The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance seized on the data, pointing out how the latest U-Haul data shows that all nine states without an income tax improved their standings since last year. The watchdog group says the Bay State’s ranking “reflects a broader pattern of high taxes, rising housing costs, and burdensome NetZero climate mandates.”

MassFiscal Executive Director Paul Diego Craney is calling for state lawmakers to repeal climate mandates and the Fair Share Amendment, or the so-called millionaire’s tax.

“For years, state leaders have dismissed out-migration as anecdotal or temporary,” Craney said in a statement. “This data tells a very different story. When people are voting with their feet year after year, it’s not because of the weather. It’s because Massachusetts has become too expensive, too rigid, and too hostile to growth.”

Meanwhile, Raise Up Massachusetts, a coalition that has advocated for the 4% surtax on incomes over $1 million, is highlighting how the Institute for Policy Studies found last year that the tax “expanded” the number of Bay State millionaires in its first two years.

Andrew Farnitano, a spokesman for Raise Up Massachusetts, argues that “corporate lobbyists” will use the 2026 U-Haul data “to advocate for tax breaks for the wealthy,” and that “multi-millionaires are not renting their own U-Haul trucks when they move.”

“Working families in Massachusetts are clearly struggling with the high cost of living,” Farnitano said in a statement shared with the Herald, “and Massachusetts needs to do much more to address the drivers of our affordability crisis, like housing, childcare, and healthcare costs that are driving low- and middle-income residents out of the state.”

“To do so,” he added, “we need to make the ultra-rich and large corporations, who just got a massive federal tax cut, pay their fair share so Massachusetts can invest in affordable healthcare, housing, and childcare.

U-Haul has indicated that the rankings aren’t a direct correlation to population or economic growth, but the index is an “effective gauge of how well states, metros and cities are attracting and maintaining residents.”

The moving company found that climate plays a role in appealing to the moving public, with eight of the top 10 states located in the south, including four of the top five in the Southeast. Eight of the bottom 10 states are northern states.

Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina are the top five – the same group from the past two years, but in a different order.

“Blue-to-red state migration, a hotly debated political topic that became more pronounced after the pandemic of 2020, continues to be a discernible trend,” the company stated in a release. It added that nine of the top 10 states voted Republican in the last presidential election, while seven in the bottom 10 voted Democrat.

“We continue to find that life circumstances — marriage, children, a death in the family, college, jobs and other events — dictate the need for most moves,”  U-Haul International president John “J.T.” Taylor said in a statement.

Suffolk University released a poll in November showing that one in three Massachusetts voters has at least thought about moving out of the Bay State due to concerns about the rising cost of living in the past year.

MassGOP Chairwoman Amy Carnevale says the state’s bottom-five U-Haul ranking is a “direct result of failed leadership under Governor Maura Healey and one-party rule on Beacon Hill.”

The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a Herald request for comment.

“Runaway spending, higher taxes, and escalating utility bills have made the state less affordable and less competitive,” Carnevale said in a statement shared with the Herald, “at a time when residents and businesses need relief. The voters can and should demand change in 2026.”