Denver Has Nation’s No. 3 Job Market, Wall Street Journal Reports

_{Austin has the best job market in the entire country, according to Wall Street Journal, as tech companies continue to target the Texas capital for secondary office locations.
Arnold Wells/ABJ}

Thanks partly to big moves by Big Tech, Austin has been ranked the top market for jobs in the U.S. for the second year in a row.

Nashville, which recently secured a significant batch of new Amazon jobs, ranked No. 2 in the Wall Street Journal list. Denver moved up from No. 9 to No. 3, followed by Seattle and San Francisco.

The ranking comes from The Wall Street Journal, which used data from Moody’s Analytics to rank large metro areas across the nation. The rankings were based on unemployment rates, new jobs, wage growth and other factors.

Among Denver’s enviable stats for 2019: Unemployment was at 3.0%, or eighth-best in the nation. Its labor force participation ranked No. 1 at 70.7%. Meanwhile, wages grew at 4.8%, good for fourth place. And labor force growth came in at 1.7% — or 14th best, the data show.

Austin’s top billing is driven partly by the rapid expansion of secondary office locations for some of the world’s biggest tech companies. Apple Inc., for example, is building a billion-dollar campus in Northwest Austin. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook and Amazon have all recently added major, new office spaces and continued to grow their local ranks.

Among smaller metros analyzed, Boulder ranked No. 1. Fort Collins and Greeley made the top 10.

bizjournals.