New York’s share of America’s millionaire households fell from 12.7 percent in 2010 to 8.7 percent in 2022, the steepest relative decline of any state, according to the Citizens Budget Commission’s (CBC) Competitive NYS: Value Proposition Tracker, a nonpartisan think tank and watchdog.
Had the state simply held its 2010 share, the watchdog estimates, personal income tax collections would have been roughly $10.7 billion higher in tax year 2022 alone.
The National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF), a Washington-based advocacy group that campaigns for lower taxes, reached a similar conclusion in a May study. Using a 2013 baseline and counting both state and local taxes, it put the annual cost at $12.2 billion.
The baselines differ; the direction does not. No state is shedding its slice of the nation’s million-dollar earners faster than New York.
A Growing Pie, a Shrinking Slice
In absolute terms, New York’s millionaire population continues to grow. Households reporting adjusted gross income above $1 million to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rose from 41,520 in 2013 to 69,780 in 2022, but the NTUF calculates the figure would have reached 95,812 had the state kept its 2013 share.
But other states added millionaires at a much faster rate. Between 2010 and 2022, New York’s millionaire count doubled while California’s and Texas’s tripled and Florida’s quadrupled, dropping the Empire State from the second-largest concentration of millionaires in the country to fourth.
The fiscal exposure is unusually concentrated. A single New York millionaire pays as much state and local tax as roughly 39 average residents, according to the NTUF, while the Tax Foundation estimates the top one percent of earners contribute about 45 percent of state income tax receipts.
Per capita state and local collections stand at $12,495, fully 78 percent above the national average and the highest in the country.
“The Data Cannot Isolate a Single Cause”
Mona Shah, managing partner of Mona Shah & Associates Global, cautions against reading the numbers as a one-variable morality tale. “What the data cannot do is isolate a single cause,” she tells IMI, though she considers taxes “plainly part of the picture.”
The rate gap is significant. New York City residents face the nation’s highest combined top marginal rate at 14.8 percent, against 13.3 percent in second-placed California, while the destinations of choice, Florida and Texas, levy no personal income tax at all.
Other forces moved in the same direction over the same period. The 2017 federal cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions “sharply raised the effective cost of New York taxes for high earners,” Shah notes, while the post-2020 normalization of remote work, housing costs, and quality-of-life concerns all pushed the same way.
Her conclusion cuts both ways: “Attributing the shift to tax rates alone overstates what the evidence shows, and dismissing taxes entirely ignores where the movers went.”
The Cuomo Record, Revisited
A popular version of the story holds that rates barely moved under former Governor Andrew Cuomo. That premise “needs adjusting,” Shah argues: Cuomo held rates largely steady for most of his tenure, but in April 2021 he signed a budget raising the top state rate on high earners, which pushed the combined top New York City rate to its current nation-leading level.
Pandemic-era outmigration accelerated around the same time, though “disentangling the tax effect from COVID-driven relocation is genuinely difficult,” she says. What the data do establish is chronology: the millionaire-share decline began well before 2021, so “the trend predates that hike.”
Mamdani’s 2 Percent Hike, and Albany’s Veto
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office on January 1, campaigned on adding 2 percentage points to the city’s top income tax rate on incomes above $1 million, lifting it from 3.9 percent to 5.9 percent and pushing combined top marginal rates toward 16.8 percent.
Whether that accelerates departures “is a prediction and not a fact,” Shah says, but she points to two constraints on the agenda.
First, city income tax changes require Albany’s approval, and Governor Kathy Hochul, who faces re-election in November, has opposed the hike while publicly urging “patriotic millionaires” to return from Florida.
Second, political limits have already asserted themselves: Mamdani floated a 9.5 percent property tax increase in February as a fallback for the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap, then abandoned it in May after the City Council refused to back it.
The gap was ultimately closed with about $4 billion in state aid, agency savings, and a Hochul-endorsed pied-à-terre tax on second homes valued above $5 million, projected to raise $500 million a year.
Tax Foundation analysts argue the signal sent to high earners matters as much as any enacted policy: the perception that New York is not done raising taxes may itself drive relocation decisions.
Exaggerated or Existential?
Mamdani’s rebuttal is that the tax base can absorb it. Asked about the CBC study on Monday, he dismissed flight concerns, describing New York as “the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world” and noting the state gained millionaires even after past increases.
His position has some empirical backing: Cristobal Young, a sociology professor at Cornell University who has spent years analyzing IRS records to study whether the wealthy actually move in response to tax increases, has found in a study released in December that top earners relocate far less readily than assumed.
Manhattan luxury-home contracts, meanwhile, jumped 25 percent month-on-month in the weeks after Mamdani’s election, according to Bloomberg.
Shah’s view is that both framings contain truth, which is why the debate persists. The state’s economy, at roughly $2.5 trillion, remains the country’s third-largest behind California and Texas, and the city’s population rebounded in 2023 and 2024.
The rebound, however, “was driven by international immigration, not returning high earners,” she says, leaving a heavier load on a narrowing base of top taxpayers.
For the investment migration market, domestic relocation could prove the first link in a longer chain. The same households weighing Miami over Manhattan are increasingly the ones driving record American demand for golden visas and second citizenships, a trend Shah flagged to IMI as early as 2024, when she observed that even former EB-5 investors were beginning to look beyond the US.
