Americans are moving less, spending more on services when they do move, and increasingly using home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) to renovate instead of relocate, according to a new Bank of America Institute report based on internal customer data.
The number of people changing addresses continued to fall in the second quarter of 2026 across income groups, generations and move types, Bank of America account data shows. While longer-distance moves remain weaker overall than local moves, the year-over-year decline in same-city moves accelerated in Q2 2026.
The slowdown is broad-based but most pronounced for lower-income households, followed by middle-income households. Higher-income customers show a more modest pullback but are still moving less than a year ago.
Gen Z is the only cohort with more movers than two years earlier, but its activity has softened over the past year. Millennials show the steepest decline in movers, while Gen X movers are down about 5% year over year and baby boomers are down about 4%.
For housing professionals, fewer moves mean less churn in the for-sale and rental markets, slower household formations at the margins, and more pressure to find business via refinances, HELOCs and renovation-driven financing rather than purchase originations or relocation-driven listings.
Midwest metros lead population growth
The report found that the Midwest continues to lead domestic population growth, with many of the fastest-growing metro areas in that region, although Salt Lake City ranked as the fastest-growing metro overall in Q2 2026. Midwest metros such as Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, Cincinnati and Milwaukee remained among the leaders, while growth moderated in several markets, particularly Minneapolis.
Southern metros like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama, maintained solid growth, with Birmingham’s population growth accelerating in Q2 2026. Pittsburgh was the fastest-growing Northeastern metro in the dataset.
At the same time, populations continued to fall in most of the largest U.S. metros, with the notable exceptions of Dallas, Phoenix and Philadelphia. While outflows picked up slightly in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., they moderated in Los Angeles, New York City and Miami.
Florida’s pattern appears to be stabilizing. The report notes a deceleration in population outflows across most major Florida MSAs. In Orlando, outflows slowed modestly, while in Tampa, they effectively stalled. Jacksonville saw an acceleration in population growth.
These shifts reinforce the post-pandemic pattern of growth in smaller and mid-sized markets, especially in the Midwest and selected Sun Belt metros. For homebuilders, mortgage lenders and real estate agents, the demand story increasingly sits outside traditional coastal magnets.
Despite the decline in the number of movers, spending around moves is rising. Bank of America card data shows that average total card spending per household in the six months leading up to a move, the month of the move and the six months after rose significantly year over year for movers in July 2026, after two years of relatively flat trends.
For households that moved in July, total card spending increased 9.5% year over year, based on a three-month moving average, compared with a 5.5% year-over-year increase for all customers. Spending at moving companies also increased, as did online spending tied to moves. Some of this uptick likely reflects higher gas prices feeding into moving company costs, as well as a skew toward younger and higher-income movers who favor services and e-commerce.
In contrast, spending at furniture and home improvement retailers among movers rose only about 1% year over year. Bank of America Institute interprets this as a shift toward convenience, with more money going to moving-related services and online purchases and relatively less to big-box home improvement and furniture stores in the immediate move window.
For housing-adjacent retailers, the data suggests that the “moving bump” in spending is increasingly captured by services and digital channels rather than traditional brick-and-mortar categories.
HELOC utilization rises as homeowners renovate
Bank of America data also indicates that homeowners are leaning more on HELOCs to finance home-related spending. Overall HELOC utilization rates have climbed since 2024 and are now above their 2014 to 2019 average, coinciding with some easing in the effective federal funds rate from its peaks of 2023 and 2024.
HELOC-funded spending on homes and on services was up sharply both year over year and relative to pre-pandemic levels as of June 2026. While home spending growth has decelerated somewhat in 2026 compared with 2025, services and transfers or withdrawals funded by HELOCs have accelerated. The report notes that some of these transfers and services payments may reflect renovation work paid directly to contractors rather than to home improvement retailers.
Even with the recent gains, HELOC-funded services spending remains well below the spike seen in summer 2020, when pandemic-era remodeling surged. Still, the data points to a durable base of renovation activity supported by home equity rather than new purchase mortgages and relocations.
For lenders, HELOCs and other equity products look increasingly important as purchase volumes remain constrained by low mobility and existing low-rate mortgages. For contractors and builders, the data signals continued demand for renovation work, even if spending channels may shift away from retailers toward direct payments.
The report relies on aggregated and anonymized Bank of America internal data from consumer checking, savings, credit and other investment accounts, as well as credit and debit card transactions and payments data, for customers with open accounts from Q1 2023 through Q2 2026. Migration patterns are inferred from changes in customer home addresses and analyzed at the metro level.
This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.