How many teachers actually move between each pair of states

Nobody publishes this. We computed it from two federal datasets, and the answer reframes what an interstate licensing product can and cannot be: the largest teacher corridor in the United States carries roughly 730 credentialed K-12 teachers a year.

Computed 9 September 2026 ACS 2024 · BLS OEWS May 2025 Method and scripts published below

First finding: the obvious data source does not exist

The natural way to rank teacher corridors would be each state's count of certificates issued to out-of-state applicants, broken down by the applicant's previous state. We could not find a single state publishing it. Texas comes closest and it is instructive how close that is not: TEA publishes a live queue depth, but no annual total, no breakdown by sending state, and no historical series. So this is a proxy — a good one, with its assumptions written down.

The method

estimated K-12 teacher movers (origin → destination, per year)
  = ACS state-to-state migration flow (origin → destination)
  × (origin state's K-12 classroom-teacher jobs per 1,000 jobs ÷ 1,000)
  × 0.47   ← national employment-to-population ratio, a constant

“K-12 classroom teacher” is the sum of nine occupational codes, chosen to match the licence classes a corridor pack would cover: elementary (25-2021), middle (25-2022), secondary (25-2031), secondary CTE (25-2032), and special education at each band (25-2052, 25-2057, 25-2058, 25-2059).

What the method assumes, stated plainly

Teachers move at the same rate as the general population. Probably conservative — teachers are more likely than the average worker to relocate for a spouse's posting — but unmeasured.
The origin state's teacher density applies to its out-migrants. The estimator's main weakness.
The 0.47 constant does not affect the ranking, only the absolute figures.
Migration flows count moves, not job changes. Some movers retire, leave teaching, or already hold the destination licence.

Read the absolute numbers as order-of-magnitude. Read the ranking as reliable — the ACS margins of error on the top flows are 8–20% of the estimate, comfortably below the gaps between ranks.

The top 40 corridors

#	Corridor	ACS 2024 flow	Est. K-12 movers/yr	Est. secondary only	Destination K-12 jobs
1	New York → New Jersey	56,799	730	195	129,810
2	California → Texas	77,161	685	198	420,750
3	New York → Florida	50,661	651	174	187,300
4	Texas → California	45,447	639	169	344,110
5	Texas → Florida	45,259	636	169	187,300
6	New Jersey → Pennsylvania	38,467	548	161	151,010
7	New Jersey → New York	36,002	513	151	264,770
8	California → Nevada	53,289	473	136	24,830
9	California → Arizona	52,383	465	134	60,100
10	Florida → Georgia	52,371	464	123	113,020
11	Florida → Texas	52,219	463	123	420,750
12	Texas → Oklahoma	28,074	395	105	48,080
13	Pennsylvania → Florida	33,530	392	136	187,300
14	California → Washington	43,938	390	113	65,510
15	Texas → Colorado	27,574	388	103	66,880
16	New York → Pennsylvania	29,274	376	100	151,010
17	Georgia → Florida	34,388	374	85	187,300
18	New York → Texas	28,233	363	97	420,750
19	Virginia → Florida	28,901	357	103	187,300
20	South Carolina → North Carolina	29,982	353	98	104,630
21	Virginia → North Carolina	28,409	351	101	104,630
22	Virginia → Maryland	28,004	346	100	70,350
23	North Carolina → South Carolina	33,151	330	90	57,720
24	Illinois → Indiana	25,727	326	89	68,530
25	New York → Connecticut	25,095	322	86	48,350
26	New Jersey → Florida	22,646	322	95	187,300
27	California → Florida	36,194	321	93	187,300
28	New York → California	24,927	320	85	344,110
29	Louisiana → Texas	24,170	313	89	420,750
30	Illinois → Florida	24,410	309	84	187,300
31	Illinois → Wisconsin	24,045	304	83	67,150
32	Pennsylvania → New Jersey	25,902	303	105	129,810
33	Maryland → Virginia	25,183	301	71	108,130
34	Florida → North Carolina	33,591	298	79	104,630
35	Illinois → Texas	23,509	298	81	420,750
36	Texas → Georgia	20,968	295	78	113,020
37	California → Oregon	31,500	280	81	36,190
38	Oregon → Washington	32,341	280	91	65,510
39	Texas → Louisiana	19,850	279	74	53,260
40	California → New York	31,367	279	80	264,770

Why this number matters more than it looks

It sets a ceiling on what any interstate-licensing product can be. Fifteen corridors — the largest fifteen in the country — carry roughly 7,680 teacher-movers a year between them. In an average 45-day window that is about 947 people.

Two consequences follow, and both are the kind of thing worth knowing before building rather than after:

Seasonality is not a detail. Teacher moves cluster into the April–August hiring season. A product measured in November is being measured in the trough.
Traffic is the binding constraint, not conversion. At these volumes, whether a product like this works is decided by whether its pages are found at all.

Sources and reproducibility

U.S. Census Bureau — State-to-State Migration Flows, ACS 1-year estimates, table T13 (2024 data), downloaded 9 September 2026. Released 21 January 2026. Archived byte-exact as downloaded.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, state file, May 2025, downloaded 9 September 2026. Archived byte-exact as downloaded.

Both files are archived byte-exact as downloaded. The extraction and ranking are three short zero-dependency scripts — scripts/census-flows-extract.js, scripts/bls-k12-teacher-stats.js and scripts/corridor-rank.js — and the computed output is committed at analysis/data/corridor_ranking_2026-09-09.json. Anyone can re-run it and get the same table.

Citing this study

Cite it as: Teacher Cert Pathfinder, “How many teachers actually move between each pair of states”, 9 September 2026, and please cite the Census Bureau and BLS for the underlying data. We recompute when either dataset updates, and the date on this page changes with it.