Atlanta Ranked #11 In CBRE’s Annual ‘Scoring Tech Talent’ Report

Atlanta – July 14, 2022 – Atlanta ranks #11 overall in CBRE’s 2022 Scoring Tech Talent report as North American tech-talent employment bounced back from the pandemic to post job gains across most top markets in 2021, though the industry’s resilience will be tested again amid economic turmoil in 2022, according to a new report from CBRE.

The U.S. added a net 136,000 tech talent jobs last year across established hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and Seattle as well as smaller markets like Nashville, Cleveland and California’s Inland Empire. Both tech job growth and tech office leasing proved resilient by rebounding in 2021 from slowdowns in 2020.

As more than half a dozen tech companies announced new offices in Atlanta last year, the city saw 1,300 new tech jobs added between 2020 and 2021 alone, according to CBRE. Between 2016 and 2021, total tech employment grew by 8,900 jobs in Atlanta, or 7 percent, a trend that is expected to continue.

“Atlanta’s tech talent workforce has expanded steadily in recent years due to rapid growth of Atlanta based companies as well as out-of-town based tech companies opening new offices and expanding existing ones,” said Christian Devlin, CBRE Senior Vice President and Tech & Media Practice leader in Atlanta. “Atlanta has benefited from its leading universities, concentration of tech companies, highly skilled and diverse tech talent pool, and a great quality of life combined with a relatively low cost of living and doing business.”

CBRE’s report, now in its 10th year, ranks the top 50 North American markets by analyzing 13 measures of their ability to attract and develop tech talent, including tech graduation rates, tech-job concentration, tech labor pool size, and labor and real estate costs.

CBRE also ranks the Next 25 emerging tech markets on a narrower set of criteria. Tech talent is defined as 20 key tech professions -- such as software engineers and systems and data managers – across all industries.

Atlanta stood out in the report in several other key areas:

• It saw the sixth most tech degree competitions (8,689) in 2020 of any North American market. This represents a 61.2 percent jump from 2015.
• It also saw 37,922 students graduate with tech degrees between 2016-2020, the seventh most of any North American market.
• Atlanta’s population of millennials (aged 25 to 39) increased by 8.1 percent from 2015 to 2020, placing it among the top 20 large markets in North America in that span.
• Atlanta has relatively affordable real estate costs for a leading tech hub. Its average annual office asking rent is 20th most expensive at $29.48 per sq. ft. per year, its average monthly apartment rent is 16th most expensive at $1,586 and its ratio of tech salary to apartment rent of 18.9 percent is 24th highest.

Top 12 Tech Talent Markets

Rank	Market	Index Score
1	San Francisco Bay Area	85.52
2	Seattle	79.39
3	Toronto	68.93
4	Washington, D.C.	67.88
5	New York Metro	67.08
6	Austin	65.19
7	Boston	62.38
8	Vancouver	62.19
9	Dallas/Fort Worth	58.57
10	Denver	57.53
11	Atlanta	57.16
12	LA/Orange Country	57.12

To download the full report, click here.