Years into its famous growth story, North Texas has notched another accolade — the country’s top large metro area for attracting workforce talent.
Dallas-Fort Worth took the number one spot among metro regions with at least 250,000 people, according to Lightcast’s annual Talent Attraction Scorecard released on Monday. The global labor market data firm based its report on information from 2024.
“Dallas crushed,” says Cole Napper, Lightcast’s vice president of research who worked on the data.
To come up with the scorecard, the firm compiled data on more than 900 American regions across seven different categories — including each region’s overall, high-income and blue-collar job growth, plus college-educated and prime-age population growth.
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The ranking weighted each component equally, but D-FW’s impressive result came from its score in one category: “Competitive Effect.” That term quantifies how much a given region’s population has grown relative to what would be expected, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
D-FW’s population, which is currently over 8 million — or about 2 million people higher than 15 years ago — had shot up by a whopping 11.7 standard deviations above the mean, Lightcast found. That is the most dramatic score of any among the nearly 200 large metro areas in the study.
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“Dallas has been scoring quite well over the past decade,” says Napper. “If I were to give my own hypothesis on why that’s the case, it’s because of a cumulative effect where growth begets more growth, attraction begets more attraction.”
“As a person who lives here,” he added, “I mean you see cranes all over Downtown and Uptown Dallas, right, but you see cranes 40 miles north of Dallas, and you see them 40 miles north of Fort Worth … This metro is booming, and it’s going to continue.”
It’s a boom that lately has been most visible in the form of the region’s burgeoning financial sector, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and other marquee Wall Street names all expanding their North Texas presence in recent months.
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This month, the Canadian banking giant Scotiabank also got in on the action, announcing it would establish a 133,000-square-foot regional headquarters at the Victory Commons One building, adjacent to American Airlines Center.
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“Texas is the new financial services capital of America,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement praising the move.
D-FW also scored relatively well in Lightcast’s other categories, especially overall job growth and high-earning job growth, a category that would encompass the region’s soaring tech sector.
Another recent report, from the commercial real estate firm CBRE, found that North Texas had added nearly 50,000 tech workers between 2021 and 2024, an increase that was second among U.S. metro areas behind only New York.
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“The AI data centers growing here are a huge piece of infrastructure that will set apart Dallas from the most of the world. The business-friendly environment in Texas partly drives this, along with the strong Fortune 500 presences,” according to Darrell Hill, senior director of AI, analytics and marketing at LightHouse Strategy, a consulting firm.
North Texas wasn’t the only nearby metro to perform well in Lightcast’s rankings: Among large metro areas, greater Austin came in second overall — with top 10 scores in every category — greater Houston came in 6th, and Killeen-Temple ranked 16th, with a top ranking for prime-age population growth.
Florida metros filled out the rest of the top 10, led by Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Destin, with areas in the Sun Belt and Mountain West also scoring well.
Read more on The Dallas Morning News
