Machaela Casey

Talent doesn’t stay where it used to. Over the past several years, the map of where companies relocate employees has been quietly redrawn — away from a handful of legacy high-cost hubs and toward a wider set of growth markets that offer lower costs of living, favorable tax environments, and an expanding base of corporate […]

For decades, relocation lived on the wrong page of the budget. It was filed under logistics — a cost to be minimized, a line item finance squeezed, an operational chore handed to whoever had capacity. That framing is now actively out of step with how the most effective organizations think. In the Atlas Van Lines […]

Most of what goes wrong in an employee relocation is visible — a missed delivery date, a damaged item, an unhappy transferee. Compliance failures are different. They’re invisible until they aren’t, and by the time they surface — a payroll-tax notice, an immigration violation, a data-protection complaint, a duty-of-care gap exposed by an incident — […]

The lump sum is the most seductive idea in corporate relocation: hand the relocating employee a fixed sum of money, let them manage their own move, and reduce the whole complicated business of moving a person to a single, predictable line item. For an overstretched HR or mobility team, the appeal is obvious — one […]

When a company extends a relocation offer to an employee, it has already invested: a role has been scoped, a hiring or promotion decision made, a budget approved, and often a counselor and a home-finding process engaged. So when nearly half of those offers get turned down, it isn’t a small friction — it’s a […]

Ask three mobility professionals what an employee relocation costs and you’ll get three different numbers — $5,000, $50,000, and “it depends” — and all three are correct. The cost of relocating an employee in 2026 spans a range so wide that a single figure is almost meaningless without the context that produces it: the employee’s […]

Sixty-three percent of corporate mobility teams now use artificial intelligence somewhere in their relocation programs, according to the Atlas Van Lines 59th Annual Corporate Relocation Survey. A year ago that figure would have read as a forecast. In 2026 it reads as a baseline — and the teams that aren’t yet using AI are increasingly […]

If you’re planning to move a three-bedroom home across the country in 2026, the single most useful number to start with is a range: a full-service, professionally handled move typically runs between $6,500 and $14,500, with a roughly 1,000-mile relocation landing around $8,000 to $11,000. Where your move falls within that band depends on a […]

New Jersey has led all fifty states in outbound migration for eight straight years, and once you look at the property-tax bill, it isn’t hard to see why. The Garden State carries the highest effective property-tax rate in the nation — about 2.23%, translating to an average homeowner bill near $9,500 a year — stacked […]

Here is a number that explains most of the New York-to-Tennessee migration in a single figure: a New York City professional earning $300,000 a year saves roughly $28,000 annually in combined state and city income tax simply by establishing residency in Nashville. Tennessee eliminated its state income tax entirely in 2021 and is now one […]

Ask an Illinois family why they’re eyeing North Carolina and the answer usually starts with the property-tax bill. Illinois carries one of the heaviest property-tax burdens in the nation, and stacked on top of long winters and persistent worry about the state’s finances, it has sent a steady stream of residents looking south. North Carolina […]

The road from Chicago to Austin has become one of the most traveled corridors in the country, and the reasons are not hard to find. Chicagoans are leaving over rising property taxes, harsh winters, public-safety concerns, and a state budget picture that keeps tax worries near the surface — and Austin, with its booming technology […]

A move to Hawaii is unlike any other relocation in the United States, and the reason is simple: you cannot drive there. Every household that crosses the Pacific does so by ocean freight, in a steel container loaded onto a Matson or Pasha ship, often after a cross-country truck haul to a West Coast port. […]

Arkansas spent 2025 at the very top of the nation’s inbound-migration rankings — reported as the number-one state for people moving in — and the reason sits in plain sight in the state’s northwest corner. Bentonville is home to Walmart, the largest company on earth; nearby Springdale and Lowell anchor Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt; […]

For five straight years, Idaho has been one of the fastest-growing states in the country — and over the 2020-to-2025 stretch, it was the single fastest, expanding 10.4% to a population just past 2.03 million. The engine isn’t births; it’s people. Net migration accounted for roughly 76% of the state’s 2025 growth, some 22,000 new […]

Round Rock has quietly become one of the most livable suburbs in Texas. Home to roughly 145,000 people just north of Austin on I-35, it pairs the job opportunity and culture of the Austin metro with top-rated schools, a lower cost of living than the city proper, and the stability of a community anchored by […]

Few American cities have grown like Frisco. A town of 33,000 at the turn of the millennium, it crossed 200,000 by 2020 and now numbers around 250,000 — a more than 500% increase in two decades that ranks it among the fastest-growing cities in the country. That growth isn’t accidental. Frisco has become a magnet […]

The Research Triangle has quietly become one of the most desirable places to live in the country. Anchored by Research Triangle Park — home to more than 385 companies and over 60,000 technology workers — and three major research universities, the Raleigh-Durham metro pairs a high-wage knowledge economy with a cost of living that remains […]

Charlotte adds more than a hundred new residents every day. The metro has grown past 2.3 million people, the city itself is approaching 923,000, and the engine behind that growth is unmistakable: Charlotte is the second-largest banking center in the United States, home to Bank of America’s global headquarters and a major hub for Truist, […]

Nashville is no longer just Music City. Oracle is building a campus on the East Bank that’s projected to bring thousands of jobs; Amazon, AllianceBernstein, and a deep bench of healthcare companies have planted major operations here; and the metro added roughly 35,000 residents in a single recent year. The music industry still gives Nashville […]