The 2025 New York mayoral race has reignited debates over whether increasing taxes on high earners will cause them to move away in search of lower tax rates. Critics of frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s plan to fund social programs argue that raising taxes on millionaires will lead to significant out-migration among the wealthy. However, analysis of new 2023 tax data from the New York Division of Taxation and Finance (DTF) refutes this claim, confirming that tax flight among top earners is a myth.

Highlights

• New 2023 tax data from the NYS Department of Tax and Finance confirm FPI’s prior findings that New York’s top 1 percent of earners move out of state less frequently than all other income groups.
• Migration data show that there was no notable increase in out-migration among high earners following the State’s 2021 increases to the top Personal Income Tax rates. These higher tax rates raise approximately $3.6 billion annually.
• FPI analysis of part-year resident filing rates, which reflect migration patterns, shows that the trends among high earners in 2023 align closely with pre-pandemic patterns (2015–2019), indicating that the 2021 tax increases did not change high earner migration behavior.
• Following the 2021 PIT rate increases, high earners’ share of total state income showed no significant changes—indicating that the rate increases did not have adverse effects on high earners’ incomes.
• Because fears of tax flight are unfounded, policymakers should support raising tax rates to fund essential programs such as universal childcare, affordable housing, Medicaid, and public transit.