Salt Lake City ranks No. 16 in CBRE’s annual ‘Scoring Tech Talent’ report

Salt Lake City ranks No. 16 overall in commercial real estate firm CBRE’s 2023 “Scoring Tech Talent” report, moving up two spots from last year. The firm said the improvement came despite macroeconomic headwinds slowing tech talent hiring by major tech firms in North America.

Overall, the U.S. and Canada added a net 760,000 tech talent jobs since 2020 across established hubs such as the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Seattle and Vancouver as well as smaller markets like Nashville, Cleveland and Canada’s Waterloo region. The number of U.S. tech talent workers increased 7.3 percent from May 2021 to May 2022, which is significantly higher than the 5 percent growth in total U.S. employment in May 2022. Software developers and programmers across all industries accounted for more than half of the new tech talent employment.

“Salt Lake City had the largest population increase of people in their 20s from 2016 to 2021,” said Eric Smith with CBRE’s Tech & Media Practice in Salt Lake City. “This, coupled with the overall tech talent workforce of the metro growing by nearly 40 percent in the past five years, proves Salt Lake City is a desirable market for tech workers and is worthy of its continued climb in ranking on this list.”

CBRE’s “Scoring Tech Talent” report covers 75 North American markets, ranks the top 50 tech markets in the U.S. and Canada and outlines tech talent labor market trends amid economic shifts and increased remote hiring. 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.

For the first time this year, CBRE’s report examines tech talent wages paid by tech companies based on geography. Salt Lake City had the 18th-highest average annual wage for tech talent ($85,552) working for tech companies out of the large tech talent markets. The San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle had the highest average wages, while Sacramento and Jacksonville were the highest among small markets.

Salt Lake City stood out in the report in several other key areas:

• Salt Lake City’s tech talent workforce of 61,400 grew by 39 percent from 2017 to 2022. That’s tied with Austin for the fifth-biggest gain among large tech talent markets.
• Salt Lake City has the eighth-highest total (8,607) of residents with a tech degree. The number of tech-related degrees grew in North America by 60,000 between 2017 and 2021.
• Utah creates more tech graduates (30,763 from 2017 to 2021) than tech jobs (14,600 from 2018 to 2022), meaning the market generates surplus tech talent for expanding and relocating companies.

Salt Lake City’s population of people in their 20s increased by 11.5 percent from 2016 to 2021, the market with the biggest gain among large markets in that span. Further, the percentage of Salt Lake City’s population with college degrees increased by 22.9 percent in that span.

• Salt Lake City has relatively affordable real estate costs for a leading tech hub. Its average annual office asking rent ($26.77 per square foot per year) is 25th-most expensive, its average monthly apartment ($1,600 per month) rent is 22ndmost-expensive and its ratio of tech salary to apartment rent of 20.3 percent is 17th-highest.

CBRE’s complete report can be accessed at https://www.cbre.com/insights/books/scoring-tech-talent-2023.