DALLAS — The Dallas-Fort Worth area is booming.

DFW was named the best large metro area for attracting workforce talent, according to a Lightcast data survey. The global labor market data firm created its annual Talent Attraction Scoreboard, pulling information from 2024.

(Credit: Lightcast)

“It’s a huge deal that the Dallas-Fort Worth area is just crushing it when it comes to attracting workforce talent,” said Glenn Hamer, who is the CEO of the Texas Association of Business.

He says that in the past three years, North Texas has been a magnet for technology companies.

“It’s incredibly impressive job of attracting tech workers. In the last three years alone, the area has attracted about 50,000 new tech workers. And these are the people that bring great vibrancy and wealth and creativity,” said Hamer.

According to Cole Napper, Lightcast’s vice president of research who worked on the data, Austin is No. 2.

(Credit: Lightcast)

The “competitive effect” makes the Austin area unique in attracting labor. 

“Austin, actually, other than the competitive effect score, has higher rankings on every other score, but it’s just because Dallas ranked it was number one overall. The competitive effect score was just so high it tugged all the other ratings up with it. Otherwise, Austin likely would have been number one,” explained Napper.

North Texas also scored high in Lightcast’s other categories, including overall job growth and high-earning job growth.

With major companies relocating their headquarters to the DFW region, Hamer says that’s most likely why the area scored high.

“Goldman Sachs has major operations. Charles Schwab, J.P. Morgan Chase, Scotiabank just opened up a big operation. Bank of America, you name the financial institution, and they’re coming to Dallas. We’re also the state that’s probably most advanced right now when it comes to crypto. So you add all of this up, the energy and finance is all in Texas. And the center of that is the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” explained Hamer.

According to Lightcast, North Texas was not the only metro to perform well; Houston was sixth and Killeen-Temple was sixteenth.

“That is an overall trend just shows for large metro areas that really the Sunbelt in the Mountain West. And then if you if you look at the bottom-scoring large metro areas, the worst-scoring one is Los Angeles, followed by New York, followed by Chicago, followed by San Francisco. So the areas that already historically have kind of pulled people from a job standpoint,” said Napper.