REAL ESTATE NEWS

The best U.S. tech talent markets are not necessarily the fastest-growing or the cheapest. CBRE's latest rankings instead show that the markets with the strongest combination of talent depth, specialization and staying power continue to command the top spots, even as a new group of smaller cities offers employers a lower-cost path to expansion.

That distinction matters for commercial real estate investors. AI is concentrating demand for highly skilled workers while also pulling more of those employees back into offices. At the same time, companies remain sensitive to labor costs, creating two different real estate opportunities: established tech centers where talent clustering supports office demand and smaller markets that could capture future expansion.

CBRE's 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report ranks 50 North American markets using 13 metrics measuring their depth, vitality and attractiveness to employers and workers. Tech talent concentration receives the greatest weight, while labor costs matter more than office rents because companies spend far more on people than space.

The highest-ranked U.S. markets are the San Francisco Bay Area at No. 1, Seattle at No. 2, New York Metro at No. 4, Austin at No. 5, Washington, D.C. at No. 6, Boston at No. 7 and Dallas-Fort Worth at No. 8.

San Francisco And Seattle Still Set The Standard

San Francisco's continued hold on first place shows why recent job losses have not displaced the Bay Area from the top of the tech hierarchy.

Its tech talent workforce declined 6% between 2022 and 2025, shedding 23,900 workers to reach 375,730. New York has now surpassed it as the nation's largest tech talent market. Yet 10.7% of all Bay Area workers are tech talent, compared with 5.5% across the 50 markets CBRE studied. Seattle is similarly concentrated, with tech workers accounting for 10.2% of employment. Seattle also expanded its tech workforce by 13.1% between 2022 and 2025 to 213,010.

More important in the current cycle is what kind of talent those markets contain. In the Bay Area, 61.4% of tech talent works in the tech industry, the highest share among large U.S. markets. Seattle is at 51.9%. Austin, another top-ranked market, is at 55%.

AI reinforces that advantage. The Bay Area and Seattle are among the country's four largest AI-specialty talent clusters, along with New York and Washington, D.C. That concentration helps explain why the Bay Area remains No. 1 even after several years of workforce contraction.

The tradeoff is cost. CBRE estimates that a representative 500-person company occupying 60,000 square feet would spend $90.6 million annually in the Bay Area, by far the highest figure in the ranking. Seattle comes in at $73.9 million.

For office investors, however, those high costs coexist with unusually large amounts of available space. Bay Area vacancy was 24.2% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and Seattle vacancy was 28.6%. Bay Area asking rents were also 14% below their pre-pandemic level.

That creates an unusual combination: two of the strongest talent markets in North America also have significant office availability.

New York Brings Scale While Austin Brings Concentration

New York's fourth-place overall ranking tells a different story. The metro has become the country's largest tech talent market, growing 8.4% between 2022 and 2025 to 394,300 workers.Its strength is less about tech dominating the local economy and more about the sheer breadth of its workforce. Tech talent represents only 4.2% of total employment, far below San Francisco, Seattle or Austin. Just 34.4% of New York tech talent works directly in the tech industry.

That diversity is increasingly relevant as technology employment spreads beyond traditional technology companies. New York also sits among the largest AI talent markets, giving it both scale and exposure to the fastest-growing part of the technology workforce.

Austin offers almost the inverse proposition. Its tech workforce is much smaller at 103,210, but grew 10.2% from 2022 through 2025. Tech talent accounts for 8% of local employment, and 55% of that talent works in the tech industry.

Austin is not inexpensive anymore. CBRE estimates annual operating costs of $62.5 million for its hypothetical 500-person company, while office asking rents reached $48.90 per square foot in late 2025. Those rents were among the markets that increased at least 20% from early 2020.The real estate implication is that Austin increasingly competes on talent clustering rather than simply being a cheaper alternative to coastal technology hubs.

Washington, Boston And Dallas Offer Different Paths To The Top

Washington, Boston and Dallas-Fort Worth round out the U.S. markets within CBRE's overall top 10, but they get there for different reasons.

Washington has a particularly deep workforce of 251,920 tech employees and an 8% concentration, although its tech talent base contracted 3.9% between 2022 and 2025. Boston is smaller, with 159,330 workers, but grew 6.9%, helping it advance two positions to seventh in CBRE's ranking.

Boston also combines its existing workforce with a substantial talent pipeline. The region produced 17,022 tech degree completions in 2024, second among the markets shown in CBRE's graduate data, and completions increased 26.3% between 2021 and 2024. That educational infrastructure becomes more valuable as employers compete for specialized AI and software skills rather than simply looking for the largest possible technology workforce.

Dallas-Fort Worth stands apart because its recent expansion has been so strong. The market added 37,230 tech workers from 2022 through 2025, an 18.7% increase that brought its workforce to 236,620. Among U.S. markets, that was the largest absolute increase reported by CBRE.

Dallas also added more jobs than its recent supply of tech graduates. CBRE counted 25,889 tech degrees from 2022 through 2024 against 37,230 jobs added from 2023 through 2025, a difference of 11,341. Seattle showed the same dynamic, with 24,590 jobs added against 14,805 degrees.

For CRE investors, Dallas therefore represents something different from San Francisco or Washington. Its ranking is being supported by an expanding labor market rather than primarily by the accumulated strength of a mature technology ecosystem.

Opportunity Markets Expand The Map

The most interesting longer-term real estate story may sit outside CBRE's primary 50 markets.

CBRE separately ranks 25 smaller or less-developed markets using eight of the 13 metrics in its main scorecard. The firm argues these cities can provide additional talent pools for companies looking to broaden their geographic reach, with most U.S. markets concentrated in the Midwest and South.

Huntsville is the highest-ranked opportunity market in the U.S., followed by Colorado Springs and Dayton. Albany, Providence, Las Vegas, Omaha and Rochester follow among the next U.S. cities in CBRE's ranking.

Huntsville offers perhaps the clearest combination of scale and momentum. It had 25,910 tech workers in 2025, the largest workforce among CBRE's 25 opportunity markets, and employment grew 17.9% over three years. The market produced 988 tech degree graduates in 2024. Average tech wages were $123,142.

Colorado Springs ranked third overall and second among U.S. opportunity markets. Its 20,160-person tech workforce grew 12.3% over three years, while the market produced 1,500 tech graduates in 2024. Dayton ranked fourth overall despite a 1.8% decline in tech employment, supported in part by a pipeline of 1,689 tech degree graduates against a workforce of 17,150.

The broader list shows why companies may need to look beyond simple rankings. Las Vegas, for example, grew its tech workforce 16.2% to 22,750 but produced only 516 tech graduates in 2024. Stamford grew 39.5%, the fastest rate in the group, but had just 353 graduates and average tech wages of $145,607. Grand Rapids expanded 21.8% while maintaining considerably lower average tech wages of $102,001.

Those differences matter for real estate. The opportunity markets are not miniature versions of San Francisco or Seattle. Their appeal lies in different combinations of workforce growth, university output and labor costs.

The result is a widening tech real estate map rather than a wholesale migration away from established hubs. CBRE reports that technology companies accounted for 21% of U.S. and Canadian office leasing activity in the first half of 2026, up from 13% in 2023, with rapidly growing AI companies helping drive the rebound.

For investors, that suggests two opportunities can exist at the same time. AI and specialized talent can reinforce the importance of expensive, deeply established markets such as San Francisco, Seattle and New York, while cost pressure and distributed hiring create room for Huntsville, Colorado Springs and other smaller markets to capture incremental growth.

The winners will not necessarily be the cities with the cheapest offices. CBRE's rankings make clear that labor depth and quality carry more weight than real estate costs. The office markets positioned to benefit most are therefore likely to be those where companies can find the workers they need first—and attractive real estate economics second.

Source: GlobeSt/ALM