Charlotte Ranked #27 In CBRE’s Annual ‘Scoring Tech Talent’ Report

Charlotte ranks #27 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.

Charlotte saw significant growth across several key categories in this year’s report. Charlotte’s tech labor pool was tied for the eighth-largest gains among large North American tech markets, growing 22 percent since 2016 to 61,950 in 2021. The growth increased within key demographics for tech talent with the population of millennials (aged 25 to 39) increasing by 13.9 percent from 2015 to 2020 and the population of Gen Z (aged 20 to 24) increasing by 4.4% during the same time frame.

“Charlotte and its growing tech talent workforce continue to stand out among larger, more traditional markets with its consistent tech job growth, affordable housing costs for tech employees and increasing tech wages,” said Joe Franco, a CBRE Senior Vice President in Charlotte. “While the tech industry in Charlotte is a substantial portion of its market, the city has also been seeing a number of prominent companies across several industries either expand or migrate to the greater Charlotte region in order to take advantage of the growing talent that resides in the area.”

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.

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

• Charlotte created more tech jobs (11,100 from 2017 to 2021) than tech graduates (8,048 from 2016 to 2020), underscoring that tech-job opportunities are drawing people into the metro. Charlotte has relatively affordable real estate costs for a leading tech hub. Its average annual office asking rent is 14th most expensive at $32.27 per sq. ft. per year, its average monthly apartment rent is 24th most expensive at $1,430 and its ratio of tech salary to apartment rent of 17.4 percent is 29th highest.
• Tech talent wages in Charlotte have risen 7.2 percent in the past five years to an average $98,875 across all tech occupations.

To download the full report, click here.