Fairfield County was Connecticut’s biggest winner last year when it came to attracting new residents from out of state, and one of the nation’s migration hot spots as well.

An analysis of U.S. Postal Service address-change data by National Association of Realtors Senior Economist Nadia Evanglou showed that Connecticut’s wealthiest county was 13th in the nation for the rate at which it gained new residents, tied with the Springfield, Missouri region and just behind the Stockton, California area and metro-area Memphis.

The NAR study ranked metro areas by what it called their “inbound move rate” in 2022: the number of inbound moves divided by the combined number of inbound and outbound moves. An inbound move rate of over 50 percent – Fairfield County’s was 54.7 percent – indicated the region was gaining population.

Fairfield County also beat out a large portion of the Sun Belt, including high-growth areas like Atlanta and significant parts of the North Carolina Research Triangle outside the Charlotte metro. The top three metro areas attracting new residents were Ocala and Tallahassee, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina; Florida held four of the top 10.

Aside from being located in the Sun Belt, these metro areas attracting the most out-of-town movers also had on average 5 percent more jobs in 2022 than at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, Evanglou said, while their economies recovered from the pandemic much faster than most Midwest areas and higher-cost coastal metros like New York City. But the biggest differentiator, Evanglou said, was housing affordability.

Fairfield County wasn’t alone bucking this trend: Evanglou also said Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Silicon Valley also saw migration gains.

Among Connecticut’s three major metro areas, Greater Hartford saw a slight net gain in the number of inbound movers compared to outbound movers, while New Haven County saw a slight loss.

It’s possible the boom in people moving in from out-of-town might be fading, however. The number of inbound movers in Greater Hartford fell 0.3 percent between 2019 and 2022, Evanglou found, while that figure was off 11.4 percent in Fairfield county and 12.3 percent in New Haven.