Local economic shocks can change individuals’ migration decisions, with this effect potentially varying across the lifecycle. Using data from the New York Fed Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, where we can follow people over time and have information on location and age, joined with sectoral GDP at the county level from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), we examine the response of migration rates by age group to local economic shocks. Our results indicate that prime-age adults decrease their in-migration rate to areas experiencing a recession. In contrast, the out-migration rate of retirement-age individuals increases after a local labor market experiences a positive shock. This result can explain hysteresis in raw employment and participation rates, not adjusted for demographics, due to the persistent effects of shocks on local demographic composition. Methodologically, we show that our results are robust to including bilateral controls for economic conditions, a specification emphasized in recent work to address spatial confounders.