New York overtakes the Bay Area as the largest tech talent market in the US for the first time

[Dragon36]

A new report from commercial real estate firm CBRE shows New York's metro area now has more tech talent workers than the San Francisco Bay Area, the first time that's happened in the 13 years CBRE has tracked this data. New York counted 394,300 tech talent workers in 2025 compared to 375,730 in the Bay Area, a gap that didn't exist just three years earlier.

The trend lines are what really tell the story here. New York added 30,640 tech positions between 2022 and 2025, an 8.4 percent increase, while the Bay Area lost roughly 23,900 over the same stretch, a 6 percent decline. CBRE's own explanation for the reversal points to two forces pulling in opposite directions at once: layoffs contracting the traditional tech industry workforce in the Bay Area, and New York's finance sector aggressively hiring tech and AI specialists to work inside banks and financial firms rather than pure tech companies.

There's an important nuance buried in the methodology too. CBRE defines tech talent broadly, counting highly skilled technology workers across more than 20 occupation categories regardless of what industry actually employs them, which means software engineers, data scientists, and cybersecurity specialists working inside a bank or hospital all count toward the total. That distinction matters a lot for New York specifically, given how much of its gain came from finance rather than from traditional technology companies growing their headcount.

Despite losing the raw headcount race, the Bay Area still holds onto the number one spot on CBRE's broader Tech Talent Scorecard, which factors in things like talent quality, new graduate output, and average salaries rather than just total worker count. San Francisco also remains by far the largest individual market for AI specific roles in North America, so the overall picture is less a story of decline and more one of the two regions specializing in genuinely different things

San Francisco Bay Area dethroned as largest tech talent market | Jefferson City News-Tribunewww.newstribune.com