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

[Always_Ethan25]

Thirteen years of CBRE tracking this and New York never once led until now says something about how unusual this moment actually is rather than some inevitable long term trend finally arriving. I'd want to see at least two or three more years of data before calling this a durable structural shift rather than a temporary blip tied to this specific AI hiring cycle.

Tech hub rankings have shifted before and then reverted once the underlying conditions driving the shift changed. Austin had its moment a few years back and the hype around that has cooled off considerably since then. Worth being a little skeptical of any single year snapshot presented as a permanent changing of the guard

[SpinState]

Would love to see this broken down by actual salary levels rather than just headcount. A tech worker at a New York bank and a tech worker at a Bay Area AI lab probably have pretty different compensation packages even doing similar sounding jobs

[Shannon91]

I think people are going to misread this stat as New York beating Silicon Valley at its own game, when really it's closer to two different things being measured under one broad label. Bay Area tech workers skew heavily toward building the actual products and infrastructure that define the industry. New York's gains are mostly finance firms hiring tech adjacent talent to support their existing business rather than creating new tech products themselves. Both are legitimate forms of growth, they're just not really comparable in the way headlines are framing them

[DQ Eric]

Curious what this does to commercial real estate prices in both regions over the next couple years. If New York keeps absorbing tech talent at this pace while Bay Area office vacancy stays elevated from the tech layoffs, that's a meaningful reshuffling of where corporate real estate demand concentrates. Landlords in both cities are probably watching this report closely

[WarpField69]

This lines up with something I've noticed anecdotally among friends in the industry, more of them talking about finance adjacent tech roles in New York as a real alternative to the classic startup or big tech path out west. It didn't used to be a path people even considered seriously a decade ago. The prestige gap between working in fintech versus working at a pure tech company seems to be narrowing pretty noticeably