Ranking It

Texas dominates new list of best cities to start a business

Dallas is one of the best places to start a business.

Photo courtesy of Fort Work

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Texas. Six Lone Star cities, including Dallas, land on CNBC's first-ever report on America's Best Places to Start a Business.

To determine the rankings, CNBC pulled data on cities with populations over 500,000 in categories such as business costs, quality of life, and small-company success. Dallas ranks No. 8.

One of the biggest draws for the area, says CNBC, is Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. "DFW handles 64 million passengers a year, earning it the designation as one of the busiest airports in the world," writes CNBC. "But even with its size (five airline terminals and 2,000 flights daily), DFW is well run, easy to navigate, and allows travelers to get in and out quickly."

A growing population, good salaries, and reasonable home prices contributed to Dallas' ranking. While there's no individual or corporate income tax, Dallas does levy a margins tax on gross receipts for businesses — but that hasn't stopped startups from popping up. CNBC says DFW startups attracted more than $100 million in the first quarter of 2016, four times the last quarter of 2015.

At the top of the list is Austin, which has the highest rate of new entrepreneurs in the nation. Other Texas towns in the top 20 include Houston (No. 6), San Antonio (No. 10), McAllen (No. 12), and El Paso (No. 16).

Provo, Utah, ranks second, and Washington ranks third.

City of innovation

11 Dallas-area companies make Fortune's list of most innovative for 2025

Photo by Ralph Bivins

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Eleven Dallas-Fort Worth companies have been named to Fortune’s third annual list of America’s Most Innovative Companies, joining another 14 from the state of Texas.

The group of 300 companies nationwide was rated based on production innovation, process innovation, and innovation culture, according to Fortune. In partnership with Statista, the magazine considered IP portfolios, employee, expert and customer opinions; and many other factors.

While many of the top-rated companies fell into the tech sector, Fortune reports that health care companies made up the largest portion of the 2025 list. Sixty-three honorees fell into the health care category.

Here's which companies headquartered in Dallas-Fort Worth made the list and where they were ranked:

No. 37 — AT&T
No. 59 — Texas Instruments
No. 89 — Charles Schwab
No. 91 — McKesson
No. 113 — Jacobs Solutions
No. 125 — Baylor Scott & White Health
No. 165 — Frontier Communications
No. 210 — CBRE Group
No. 223 — GameStop
No. 251 — American Airlines Group
No. 271 — Caterpillar

Dallas-Fort Worth claimed the largest number of Texas companies on the list. Houston was home to the second-most with eight hailing from the Bayou City. Austin is home to only four of the companies on the list, however, companies from the Capital City ranked higher on average, with Oracle, Tesla and Dell Technologies claiming the top three spots for the state. Beloved Texas grocer H-E-B was the one company to represent San Antonio.

Here's how the other Texas companies fared:

No. 6 — Oracle
No. 11 — Tesla
No. 14 — Dell Technologies
No. 35 — Houston Methodist
No. 52 — SpaceX
No. 54 — ExxonMobil
No. 137 — NRG Energy
No. 158 — Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
No. 169 — BMC Software
No. 175 — Texas Children’s Hospital
No. 201— H-E-B
No. 219 — TTEC Holdings
No. 227 — Sysco
No. 268 — Chevron

California-based tech conglomerate Alphabet Inc. topped the list for the third year in a row, and California companies again represented the majority of companies on the list, according to Fortune. Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, IBM and Salesforce made up the top five, of which three are headquartered in California.

The 2025 group had a median revenue of $22 billion over the last 12 months, according to Fortune. See the full report here.

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This story originally appeared on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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