BY THE NUMBERS

Dallas punches in at No. 2 on new list of cities that best attract business

Dallas, so attractive.

Photo by Sean Pavone/iStock

The companies, the jobs, and the people keep moving to North Texas. According to a recent report, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington ranks No. 2 among U.S. metropolitan areas for attracting new companies.

The ranking, which was researched and published by Site Selection Magazine, found that DFW attracted 426 business projects last year. This put the metro in second place of the list that analyzed larger regions.

It's the third year in a row that DFW has landed in second place, and the metro had a year-over-year improvement in number of deals; 2021 reported 389 new business projects in the area.

In fact, the top three cities – Chicago, Dallas, and Houston, respectively — have remained the same for all three years. For 2022, the Chicago metro garnered 448 projects, while Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land reportedly had 293 projects. Farther down the list, Austin-Round Rock had 132 projects, putting them at No. 7.

Site Selection's report focused on how companies can manage increasing economy digitization, and retain in-office workers while balancing skyrocketing telework opportunities.

Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro, said though the rise of remote work does "hollow out" downtowns, they're not "all doomed."

“Telework is here to stay, but it is not clear levels of telework have stabilized for the near or long term," she said. "There is also evidence that work agglomeration increases productivity. There is good reason to expect more RTO [return to office] than there has been so far.”

When discussing large, business-centered cities like Dallas, Brookings Metro senior fellow Mark Muro says the city is powered by "huge professional services, businesses, and health sectors that continue to become increasingly digital." Muro and his colleague Sifan Liu are studying highly digitized economies and their place in modern society.

“Across the nation’s 56 biggest metros, as much as 30% of all jobs were highly digital as of 2020, while low-digital jobs encompassed just 22% of the workforce,” they said in the report. “By contrast, highly digital occupations account for only 20% of the workforce in the nation’s more than 500 micropolitan areas, where low digital jobs account for 26% of the total. And pay gaps reflect those divides.”

The full report can be found on siteselection.com.

Business projects Site Selection Magazine rankings

Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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