Field Notes · Relocation · July 30, 2026

Is Bend, Oregon Still Worth Moving To?

Search "moving to Bend" and you'll hit thumbnail after thumbnail screaming that everyone's leaving, it's overpriced, it's over. Some of that is real. Most of it is clickbait. Here's what the data actually says about who's leaving Bend, who's still arriving, and whether it's still worth the move.

The doom-and-gloom narrative vs. the data

If you've been researching Bend on YouTube — "moving to Bend, Oregon," "relocating to Bend from California," "Bend homes for sale" — you've been served a wall of negativity. It's over in Bend. Everybody's packing up. The population's falling. It's overpriced and oversaturated. The cost of living is too high.

Some of that has a kernel of truth. A lot of it is engineered to get the click. The reality is more specific — and more interesting — because Bend and Central Oregon tell one story, and the rest of Oregon tells a slightly different one. Let's separate them.

Is everyone actually leaving Bend? (No.)

Short answer: no. Bend is still growing. Deschutes County is still growing. What's true is that Oregon as a whole has been on a roller coaster. Back in 2020–2021 the state had a population boom as people relocated in waves — but here's the part the bubble-thinking misses: people leaving California in those years went everywhere. Washington, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Oregon — all of it. It was never just Bend.

Since then Oregon leveled off, and 2022–2023 was actually a net-negative year for the state — roughly 17,000 more people left than arrived. But Central Oregon didn't feel that. Bend stayed net positive: yes, some people leave, but a healthier number keep moving in. That gap between Bend and the rest of the state is the whole point.

Where Bend is actually headed

The growth trajectory doesn't look like a town in decline. Current population projections put Bend at roughly 132,000 by 2035, 153,000 by 2045, and 175,000 by 2055. For context, when I arrived in 1990, Bend was around 25,000 people. We are growing far faster than we're losing residents — it's just that we are losing some, and it's worth understanding why.

Why some people do leave — the four real reasons

Nobody moving here from Southern California or the East Coast can imagine wanting to leave. But people move away every year, for reasons that are honest and worth knowing before you commit.

1. Affordability

Bend is not a cheap place to live anymore. The median home price hovers around $735,000 in any given month, and it's well above the national affordability index. Nationally, the median age of a first-time buyer is now 40 — six years ago it was 31. That wall is even higher here. Plenty of people with good jobs still can't buy, and those who do can end up house-rich and cash-poor, with most of their income going to the mortgage and little left for the life they moved here for. It pushes people out.

2. The remote-work window is narrowing

In 2020–2021, a lot of people got permission to work from anywhere and chose Bend — and why not? It sits a short flight from Seattle and San Francisco; you can leave Roberts Field at 5 a.m. and be in a San Francisco meeting by 10. That convenience made Bend a remote-work magnet. Now employers are tightening up. I've had clients recently who wanted to move here full-time and were denied the remote arrangement by their employer. It's not universal, but the remote-work lifestyle that fed a lot of Bend's growth is no longer a sure thing.

3. Fixed-income and long-time residents getting squeezed

This ties back to affordability. Long-term residents and retirees on fixed incomes are feeling the pinch. What felt manageable 30 or 40 years ago now competes against rising costs, crowds for every amenity, and smoke season. At some point they ask whether it's still worth it — and whether their money would go further somewhere with a slower pace. For a lot of them, the answer is to leave.

4. Lifestyle burnout

Bend used to be a quiet mill town with mountains, lakes, rivers, and sunshine. Now it draws 4-plus million visitors a year, many funneling right through town, seemingly all at once. For a place this small, it can feel fast-paced and crowded. Add the seasonality — wildfires nearby and the summer smoke that's become a near-yearly pattern over the last decade (we're enduring fires and haze in July right now, after an unusually mild winter) — and it adds up. Crowds, cost, and smoke can collectively burn people out, and some simply want out.

Who's moving in to more than replace them

So who offsets the departures and keeps Bend net-positive? Increasingly, retirees from all over the country — and it's partly a network effect. At 100,000-plus people, Bend has crossed a threshold: it's big enough now to attract a wider pool of people who'd never have considered a genuinely small town. The more people adopt Bend, the more others want to. Healthcare keeps improving and getting more accessible, the amenities are already here, and for a lot of retirees the current size is exactly right. That same 100,000 could be the launch pad for the next, larger growth spurt.

So — is Bend still worth it for you?

You've now seen the honest reasons people leave. Whether that deters you is your call to make. But here's the part that matters if you're actually shopping: the 2026 market has shifted in buyers' favor. Inventory has ticked up, and a lot of sellers are fatigued — some need to sell, some just haven't accepted that this is a normal market again rather than the frenzy of five or six years ago. Either way, if you're a buyer, you have negotiating power you haven't had in years.

Bend isn't over. It's normalizing — and for the right buyer, a normalizing market with more choice and more leverage is a better time to move than the top of a boom. Want the full picture before you decide? Start with my guide to moving to Bend from California, the honest read on whether Bend's market will crash, and the Bend cost-of-living breakdown.