New York City’s economy grew in 2024. Wall Street held up. The jobs numbers looked decent. None of that is the whole picture.
The Citizens Budget Commission dropped a report Monday that cuts through the headline data and finds something uglier underneath: the city is bleeding residents, losing taxable income at a pace that doesn’t show up in GDP figures, and watching rents climb well past any trajectory that made sense before the pandemic hit.
The income loss alone is staggering. Between 2019 and 2023, New Yorkers who left the city took $68 billion more in earnings with them than incoming residents brought in. That net drain broke down roughly into $23 billion flowing to other parts of New York state, $14 billion going to Florida, and $2 billion to Texas. Most departing residents aren’t relocating to far-flung places. Long Island, Westchester, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania absorbed the largest shares. But Florida, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia are all pulling significant numbers too.
It’s not a collapse. But it’s not healthy either.
CBC president Andrew Rein told amNewYork the concern isn’t any one number going in the wrong direction. It’s the pattern of multiple indicators pointing the same way at once. “Too many indicators are showing our value proposition is uncertain,” Rein said. He specifically flagged domestic out-migration, which jumped from 94,024 to 114,025, and said that increase can’t be dismissed. A simultaneous drop in international immigration made things worse, leaving the city with a smaller overall population heading into 2025.
The commission’s tracker does show real economic strengths. New York had 129,000 more private-sector jobs in early 2025 than it did in January 2020, and gross city product has cleared its pre-pandemic peak. Finance and information kept growing through 2025. That’s not nothing.
There’s a complication in the jobs data worth flagging, though. A state reclassification pulled roughly 40,000 health care and social assistance jobs out of New York City’s official count and moved them into other parts of the state. Without that accounting shift, CBC said, both total employment and health care job numbers would have shown gains in 2025. Rein didn’t find that particularly reassuring. He’s argued that the city’s post-pandemic recovery leaned too hard on lower-wage, publicly subsidized health care work, which he called “a shaky foundation on which to build an economy.” Job growth slowed in 2025 regardless of how you slice the reclassification, and Rein’s overall read was blunt: “a declining population with shrinking jobs in most industries demonstrates the challenges we now face right now.”
Rents aren’t helping anything.
CBC’s tracker puts asking rents at 15.2% above where they’d have landed if pre-pandemic trends had simply continued. That gap makes the city harder to sell to people who don’t already have a reason to be here, and it compounds the income-drain problem by pushing out residents who might otherwise have stayed.
Public school enrollment is also shrinking, the commission found, which functions as a leading indicator. Families with options tend to leave before anyone else does, and school enrollment declines tend to precede broader population losses.
What the city can point to: it’s not facing a single catastrophic break. The structural problems the CBC identified are grinding and cumulative rather than acute. That makes them harder to dramatize and, in many cases, harder to address through any one policy lever. The finance and tech sectors remain genuinely productive. Gross city product growth outpaced the national rate in 2024. Those aren’t fake numbers.
But Rein’s framing is that resilience in a few high-visibility sectors doesn’t offset what’s happening across most of the economy. The commission’s broader argument is that New York can’t sustain healthy public finances on a declining and poorer residential base, no matter what Wall Street posts in a given quarter. CBC plans to continue updating its tracker as 2025 data becomes more complete.