New IRS data shows more taxpaying families leaving Fairfax than moving in, chased out by some of the highest taxes in Virginia. So how can the Census say the county is still growing? The full answer runs through Richmond and Washington — and it’s one Jeff McKay would rather you never put together.

More Taxpayers Are Leaving Fairfax Than Moving In — and They Have Been for Years

Cardinal News recently surfaced a number Fairfax’s leaders would rather not dwell on. According to IRS tax-return data, which tracks where people file from one year to the next, more people are moving out of Fairfax County than moving in — and growing numbers are landing in the Roanoke Valley and the Richmond suburbs.

In 2023, the most recent year available, roughly 9,000 more people left than arrived, as counted through tax filings. This is no one-year blip. Fairfax has run net out-migration for years, and the people doing the leaving are, by definition, the households filing tax returns.

Ask why a family would trade the job-rich Washington suburbs for Roanoke, and the answer isn’t the job market. It’s what a Fairfax paycheck no longer buys at home.

The Tax Stack They’re Leaving Behind

The cost of staying in Fairfax is not weather or luck. It is a stack of choices, made by the one party that has run this county for as long as the out-migration has run.

Start with a meals tax voters rejected twice. On a 9-1 vote — with Springfield Republican Pat Herrity (R-Springfield, up in 2027) the lone no — the Democrat majority imposed a 4% county meals tax effective January 1, 2026, pushing the tax on a restaurant check to 10%, despite county residents rejecting a meals tax in two separate referendums.

Then came a $337 hike dressed up as a cut. A year later, Chairman Jeff McKay (D-At-Large, up in 2027) and the Board trimmed the real estate tax rate a token quarter-penny, then let assessments climb — so the average homeowner pays $337 more, not less. The $5.7 billion budget passed 9-1. Herrity, again, was the lone no.

And the squeeze doesn’t stop at the county line. Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) signed the measure returning Virginia to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, with reentry effective July 1. Dominion projects the surcharge at about $13 a month — roughly $156 a year. A family that flees to Roanoke doesn’t escape that one. Richmond Democrats put it on every power bill in the Commonwealth.

So How Can the Census Say Fairfax Is Growing?

Here is where it gets strange. If the IRS says Fairfax is shedding taxpayers, why does the U.S. Census Bureau say the county’s population actually grew in 2023?

Both are telling the truth. They are simply measuring different things. The IRS tracks where people file their taxes — real taxpaying households packing up and leaving. The Census counts every resident, and breaks the change into three parts. For Fairfax in 2023, the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2023 estimates, as reported by Cardinal News, tell the story plainly: domestic migration ran −13,405 — far more people leaving for elsewhere in the country than arriving from it. Births outpaced deaths by 7,376. And international migration added another 8,536.

Add those together and Fairfax eked out a modest gain — not because families are choosing to stay, but because births and arrivals from abroad backfilled the residents heading for the exits.

This is not a theory. It is exactly what happens when the international piece dries up. In 2021, when international migration collapsed during the pandemic, Fairfax’s total population fell — the county’s first negative growth since 1840. The pattern has only sharpened since: in 2023–24, the county logged about 8,300 more people leaving for other parts of the country than arriving, against roughly 16,400 arriving from abroad. Even Fairfax County’s own demographic report credits the rebound to recovering international inflow.

Strip out the immigration, in other words, and Fairfax County would be shrinking.

The Number McKay Hides Behind

This is the sleight of hand buried in the “our population is stable, everything is fine” talking point. The headcount holds. The composition does not.

Fairfax is losing the established, middle-class, tax-filing families who have paid its bills for a generation — and that loss is masked by a different stream of new residents entirely. The total stays flat enough that a politician can wave it at a camera. But a stable total built on a churning base is not stability. It is replacement.

The people doing the leaving are the ones who got the meals tax, the $337 hike, and the power-bill surcharge. They voted the only way left to them: with a moving van. And the officials who handed them those bills get to point at a population number and pretend nothing is wrong.

Now, the Elephant in the Room

Readers are right to ask about the part no county press release will mention: illegal immigration. It belongs in this story — but it belongs here told straight, because the sloppy version is exactly what Fairfax Democrats are waiting to swat down.

Here is the honest accounting. The Census Bureau does not record legal status, so no one can tell you how many of those 8,536 international arrivals in 2023 were here lawfully and how many were not. A great deal of Fairfax’s immigration is legal and high-earning — green-card holders, students, and visa professionals in one of the wealthiest counties in America. Anyone who tells you the entire influx is illegal is handing the other side an easy rebuttal.

But the larger reality is not in dispute, and it is serious. Fairfax is home to one of the largest unauthorized-immigrant populations in Virginia — by the Cato Institute’s own count, a pro-immigration source, more than 100,000 residents, with nearly one in five county residents here illegally or living in a household with someone who is. And the Biden-era border surge did not skip Northern Virginia. The Heritage Foundation estimates 6.7 million people entered illegally and took up residence nationwide between 2021 and 2023; the Pew Research Center puts the total unauthorized population at a record 14 million that same year.

Then look at what Richmond did with it. On her first day in office, Spanberger rescinded the rule requiring Virginia agencies to cooperate with ICE, and within weeks ordered state law enforcement to tear up every existing 287(g) enforcement agreement. Fairfax’s own Sen. Saddam Salim (D-SD-37, up in 2027) and fellow Democrats pushed legislation to extend those restrictions to local police, raising the bar before an officer can so much as assist a federal immigration request. And through all of it, Spanberger insists, “Virginia is not a sanctuary state, full stop” — a claim that gets harder to credit with every cooperation agreement she dismantles.

So follow the whole chain. Washington opened the spigot. Richmond pulled back the enforcement and waved off the label. And Fairfax County must educate and serve a growing population — much of that growth driven by federal policy rather than local prosperity — while the property-tax base that pays for those services loads the moving truck for Roanoke.

That is the real “population growth” Fairfax’s leaders are bragging about. The taxpayers are leaving. The costs are not. And the people who engineered both ends of that squeeze are counting on you not to connect them.

They’re on the Ballot

Chairman Jeff McKay (D-At-Large), Dalia Palchik (D-Providence) and Rodney Lusk (D-Franconia) — all up in November 2027 — and every Democrat who voted yes on the taxes are on that ballot. So is every General Assembly seat that put Virginia back into RGGI and unwound cooperation with ICE.

The families who already left don’t get a vote in Fairfax anymore. The ones still doing the math do — and the math keeps pointing to Roanoke.