Dallas-Fort Worth holds rank as nation’s top labor market with solid migration and job gains

Texas cities are leading the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and northern Texas once again claims the nation’s top spot.

Dallas-Fort Worth tops all US metropolitan areas in terms of labor market performance, although national job growth is slowing, according to new data analysis from ThinkWhy of Dallas, which analyzes the top performing cities through September.

The region’s comparative success was driven by net migration, employment growth and wage growth. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale and Austin-Round Rock took second and third place, respectively.

“Don’t just take the national numbers and say this happens everywhere,” said ThinkWhy chief analyst Jay Denton. “We expect Dallas to remain an outperformer.”

The Dallas-Fort Worth findings in the ThinkWhy report mimicked those in August, which similarly cited net migration and employment gains for the region’s rapid recovery.

ThinkWhy, a software company specializing in artificial intelligence labor market information, uses its LaborIQ intelligence software to track 10 performance indicators to rank labor markets across the country.

All four major metropolitan areas of Texas are in the top 25 of the LaborIQ index. The Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin-Round Rock and Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land areas were in the top 10, while San Antonio-New Braunfels was in 24th place.

All four major metropolitan areas of Texas rank in the top 25 for the net migration indicator.

Of the main indicators, all four Texas metropolises recorded impressive net migration, while the three leading metropolises rank high in terms of job growth.

National job gains of 235,000 in August and just 194,000 in September represent slow growth that could delay expectations for pandemic recovery. The hiring rate has slowed as the country faces labor shortages in several industries.

“Sustained growth at this slower-than-forecast pace could jeopardize a recovery in 2022 and move the schedule to 2023 to reach pre-pandemic employment levels,” said Mallory Vachon, author of the ThinkWhy report.

Although Dallas ranked first based on all 10 metrics ThinkWhy used, Austin is the only metropolitan area in Texas where the number of jobs has recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Denton said Dallas will likely follow suit in 2022.

“Dallas will continue to benefit from this type of growth,” he said. “If other places are regionally strong, that also helps the neighboring cities. You will also see spill-over effects from Austin companies relying on Dallas where trade goes back and forth. “

Dallas-Fort Worth ranked first in ThinkWhy’s latest labor market report, beating the Austin and Phoenix areas.

Texas has become the new hotspot for large companies. It wasn’t until Thursday that Elon Musk announced that Tesla would move its headquarters to Austin.

More than 110 California companies relocated to Texas between January 1, 2018 and June 30 this year, making the state more than four times as many California offices as its closest competitor-based Spectrum Location Solutions, according to a study by McKinney and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Going forward, Denton said, ThinkWhy will monitor whether and how disruptive factors such as vaccination regulations, masking requirements and other social policies affect the ability of Texan cities to fill jobs.

Some of the disruptive factors will go away as the pandemic slows down. What may not go away is the tightness of the talent pipeline in certain industries.

Dallas companies are competing for a shrinking pool of technical and technical staff. Texas employers released 33,794 technology vacancies in August, the second highest total in the US, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association. More than half of these locations were in the greater Dallas area.

At the national level, the information industry is expected to be one of the last sectors to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Construction, healthcare and transportation are expected to return to normal by the end of next year.

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