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Out-of-State Driver Licenses Surrendered

CURRENT DATA

HISTORICAL DATA

GRAPHS

ANALYSIS

MOTOR VEHICLE DIVISION

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About Driver License Data

Migration patterns in Arizona, as in other states, are available every 10 years from the Census Bureau. However, short of another census or population projections, how do we know how many people are coming to Arizona as time passes? Where do they come from for that matter?

Data from the Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) of the Arizona Department of Transportation can be used with other factors to estimate Arizona adult population growth and origination. Each month, Research Administration (RA) tracks and publishes the number of out-of-state driver's licenses surrendered in Arizona and their state of origin.

This is not an actual count of population in-migration. RA does not know if the driver's license represents one person or a family of four. Those leaving the state (out-migration) cannot be measured with this method. The number and state of licenses surrendered each month can provide a partial picture of in-migration trends. Knowing the state of origin in proportion to other states can provide useful information for economists, planners and economic development officials.

Surrendered Out-of-State Driver's Licenses Grew
By 10,000 in 2008

Nearly 450,000 out-of-state driver’s licenses, or 37,295 a month, were turned in to the Arizona Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) last year, up by about 10,000 (2.3 percent) from 2007.
Read more . . .

By clicking on the link “Current Data” you will find current year numbers, by state and month, for out-of-state driver's licenses surrendered to MVD; or for prior years dating back to 1996, click on the link “Historical Data.” In addition, RA publishes several charts and graphs each month to illustrate trends in license data (“Graphs & Tables”) plus occasionally provides more in-depth analysis of these trends. Also, U.S. inter-state migration pattern analysis for two recent periods of time can be found in two Census Bureau publications, 1995-2000, 2000-2004 (5.11MB PDF file), or at the Bureau’s Web site, http://www.census.gov.