ATLANTA — Danielle Anderson landed a promotion in June that required her to move from Southern California to Houston, where she bought a $280,000 town house. Since then, the 24-year-old sales and marketing manager has spent $8,000 on furnishings, hooked up cable television, and hired a gardener.

The number of Americans moving has started to increase from a record low, promising a lift to the labor-market recovery as well as housing and consumer spending. An estimated 12 percent of US residents moved in the year ended March 2012, up from a 63-year low of 11.6 percent the prior year, according to an analysis of unpublished Census Bureau data by the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research organization. About 1.7 percent moved from one state to another, the most in five years, the data show.