9 Things Wyomingites Miss Most Once They Live Somewhere Else

For a lot of Wyomingites, what they miss when they move out of state isn’t things you can pack into a moving truck.

It’s the empty space between towns, the dark skies at night, and the wildlife moving through familiar places.

Once those things disappear, they can be surprisingly hard to replace.

These are the things Wyomingites miss most once they’ve settled somewhere else.

Note: This is general information, not financial, tax, or legal advice. Wyoming’s tax rates, license fees, and driving rules are subject to change.

Zero State Income Tax

Wyoming’s state income tax rate sits at zero, whether the money comes from a paycheck, a pension, or a Social Security check.

There’s no bracket to worry about, so nothing rises as a paycheck grows.

Nothing to file.

Move to a state with even a modest income tax, and a chunk of every paycheck starts disappearing again before it ever reaches a bank account.

For a native, that’s the first paycheck stub that stings.

Property Taxes That Barely Register

Wyoming homeowners pay some of the lowest property tax bills in the country, with an effective rate Tax Foundation puts at about 0.53% of a home’s value.

Wyoming voters made that bill even more favorable in November 2024, approving a constitutional amendment that split residential property into its own tax class for the first time.

That change opened the door for the legislature to tax an owner-occupied home differently than a rental or a commercial building.

Owners came out ahead.

Buy a house almost anywhere else, and a Wyoming native finds out the hard way what a typical property tax bill looks like.

Elk Tags Priced Like Home

A Wyoming resident can draw a full-price elk license for $62.

The same tag costs a nonresident $707 through the regular draw, and up to $1,965 through the special draw.

That gap covers a preference-point system that rewards Wyoming residency every single year a resident doesn’t draw.

That’s what staying put buys.

Give up that residency, and a native re-enters the draw priced like every other outsider, points and all.

Crossing Onto Public Land

Wyoming’s public land covers roughly 53.6% of the state, nearly 48% federal and another 5.6% held by the state government.

A 2025 ruling settled a fight over how a hunter or a hiker gets from one public square to the next.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a landowner’s appeal that October, leaving a lower court’s ruling in place: Crossing corner to corner between public parcels is legal, and no landowner’s permission is required.

The gate stays open.

Leave Wyoming, and that same walk becomes trespassing almost everywhere else that hasn’t settled the same question.

Room Nobody Else Gets

Just 588,753 people call Wyoming home, the smallest headcount of any state in the country.

The 2020 Census put that spread at about 5.9 people per square mile across the state’s 97,089 square miles.

Only Alaska spreads its residents thinner.

Room to breathe.

A native who moves almost anywhere else trades all that space for neighbors, traffic, and a line at the DMV.

Small Schools, Big Budgets

Wyoming spent $20,542 per public school student in fiscal year 2024, well above the national average, according to National Center for Education Statistics data.

Idaho spent $11,167 per student that same year, the lowest total of any state, and Montana spent $14,202.

Wyoming has out-spent both neighbors on a per-student basis for at least a decade, not just in one unusually good budget year.

The money reaches the classroom.

Move a Wyoming kid into Idaho’s public schools, and the budget behind their classroom drops by more than half overnight.

Lawmakers Within Reach

Wyoming’s state legislature seats just 93 lawmakers, 31 senators and 62 representatives, covering a population of 588,753 people.

That works out to about one legislator for every 6,300 residents, one of the smallest ratios of any state legislature in the country.

Montana’s legislature seats 150 members for 1.1 million people, and Idaho’s seats 105 for just over 2 million, both spreading a lawmaker across more residents than Wyoming does.

Everybody’s rep is a neighbor.

Move to Idaho, and a native’s new state representative suddenly answers to triple the constituents.

Skies Dark Enough for Stars

Teton County, Wyoming became the world's first county certified as an International Dark Sky Community in April 2025.

DarkSky International handed out that designation after a decade of local work to cut down outdoor lighting across the county.

You can still see it.

A native who moves to a city with heavy light pollution loses that view without ever noticing the night it disappeared.

Migrations Passing Close By

Wyoming's Path of the Pronghorn migration corridor runs up to 150 miles between Grand Teton National Park and the Green River Valley.

The National Park Service calls it the second-longest land migration in North America, and pronghorn have followed the same route for generations.

The herds just keep coming.

Once a native moves away, that yearly crossing turns into something they watch in a video clip, not from the truck.

Bottlenecks Along the Corridor

Wyoming's pronghorn migration route runs through three major bottlenecks, narrow chokepoints where a fence line or a housing development could choke the entire herd's path down to nothing.

Only one of those three, a 3,409-acre stretch of the Carney Ranch, is permanently protected today, purchased as a conservation easement with help from Wyoming's own Wildlife and Natural Resources Trust.

The other two bottlenecks still don't have that protection.

Not yet, anyway.