Nashville Ranks #41 in CBRE’s Annual ‘Scoring Tech Talent’ Report

Nashville ranks #41 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.

Nashville remained at the 41st spot in this year’s overall rankings. Nashville has one of the fastest growing tech talent workforces, posting 29.4 percent growth from 2016-2021. Nashville is the ninth-most concentrated millennial (aged 25 to 39) market with 22.6 percent of its population in this cohort, above the 20.5 percent national average. Its millennial population grew by 13 percent between 2015 and 2020.

"The Nashville tech market is blossoming," said David Gossett, a vice president at CBRE in Nashville. "Our business friendly, centrally located, collaborative community draws in companies from around the country who are looking to relocate or open a new operation. Large e-commerce and computer software companies have committed to Nashville because they recognize the growth potential and how connected we are to a huge portion of the country. As a top producer of tech jobs there are ample opportunities in Nashville for our tech degree graduates to find work. Nashville is clearly a tech market to watch."

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.

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

• Nearly 53 percent of the metro’s tech talent (19,020) work in computer, support database & systems occupations. Almost 16 percent of the Nashville tech workforce is in the healthcare industry, a notably high concentration of tech workers in a non-tech industry.
• The yearly cost to operate a typical tech firm of 500 employees occupying 75,000 sq. ft. is $40.9 million, making it the 10th least expensive market. This is a $1 million increase from last year.
• Nashville ranked as the 13th most expensive metro to live in with a career in tech. The average annualized apartment rent ($17,748) to tech wage ($86,217) ratio is 20.6 percent.
• The metro added 8,200 tech jobs between 2016 and 2021 and generated 4,819 tech-degree graduates from 2015 to 2020. This means Nashville generated the ninth largest surplus of tech jobs in that span, making it a draw for tech talent from other areas.

To download the full report, click here.