Central Texas performed well in adding white-collar, blue-collar and service jobs
A newly published report found that the Austin metro saw the strongest job growth in the entire U.S. from 2019 to 2025.
The Austin metro area saw its total number of jobs during those six years increase by 21.8%, according to a report from economic strategy and consulting firm Economic Leadership. The report found that Austin added just over 242,000 jobs during that six-year stretch, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and the local rapid economic recovery from the pandemic.
No other Texas metro area was in the top 10 for the percentage of jobs added during this period. But during this period, both Dallas and Houston added more total jobs than Austin. Dallas added 434,000 jobs – which was the most in the nation – while Houston added 246,000 jobs, which ranked fourth and just ahead of Austin
The monthly jobs report from the Texas Workforce Commission estimates the Austin metro had roughly 1.56 million jobs in July.
The Austin area has seen tremendous growth from 2019 to 2025. The pandemic caused many businesses and individuals to re-evaluate where they wanted to live, and Austin saw a huge wave of growth and development. While growth has slowed in recent years, there has been a steady flow of corporate relocations and new residents. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that from the 2020 census to July 2025, the metro area added 337,500 residents.
Ted Abernathy, the managing partner of Economic Leadership, said his team’s report relied on jobs data from the federal government and data from the labor market analytics platform Lightcast. The report also broke down how many white-collar, blue-collar, service and military jobs were added to metro areas in the U.S. It found that Austin ranked in the top 10 for growth in each category except for military jobs.
Austin ranked as the top metro area for blue-collar job growth with a growth rate of 33.2%. lt was just ahead of Huntsville, Alabama, which had a growth rate of 26.7%.
Austin ranked as the second-highest metro area for white-collar job growth with a growth rate of 27.6%. lt was only behind the 29.5% growth rate of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Austin also came in as the seventh fastest-growing metro area for service jobs with a growth rate of 9.6%. For this category, Austin was sandwiched between Bakersfield, California, which had a service job growth rate of 9.8%, and McAllen, Texas, which had a growth rate of 9.5%.
Abernathy said it wasn’t surprising to find Austin as one of the metros that have added the most jobs because it’s in a state with business-friendly regulations and taxes. The area already had a strong economic base of tech companies and higher-education institutions. Abernathy said this jobs report shows Austin’s economy continues to mature and diversify, especially when it comes to the addition of blue-collar manufacturing jobs.
“You’re just not, you’re not just a tech place anymore; you’ve seen the manufacturing going up around the city, and they come together,” Abernathy said.
One huge boost to Austin’s manufacturing sector during the time period in question was the opening of the Tesla gigafactory in 2022. In 2025, Tesla reported it had 16,500 employees in the Austin area, according to an annual repo1i by the carmaker that was submitted to Travis County. lt has yielded the third-largest job pool in the region, and has spawned thousands more jobs from the companies that supply materials and services to Tesla’s operations.
Samsung has had a similar impact, but the manufacturing landscape runs deeper than the big names. Opportunity Austin estimates the metro region has 1,900 manufacturers, and about 500 of them are in high-tech sectors.
Abernathy said a big takeaway for Austin from his team’s report was that job growth across different sectors of the economy can build off each other.
“We know that blue collar is tied to white collar because if you get progranuners, you have to have electricians, and if you’re going to grow dramatically you have to build and do those things,” he said.
Austin is also set to see its employment base increase both with blue- and white-collar jobs. The region will soon hold a major strategic hub for Apollo Global Management, and Amazon is also investing in the area by building an advanced robotics manufacturing facility on the Dog’s Head site in East Austin.
One big challenge facing Austin’s ability to continue to add jobs will be the region’s level of affordability, Abernathy said, adding that it’s still more affordable compared to coastal metro areas. He said those expensive coastal metro areas -like Boston, San Francisco and San Diego – are still good economies but their high cost of living “puts a throttle on their growth.”
Another thing that will impact the Austin job market moving forward is the development of artificial intelligence, Abernathy said. He expects Al to impact up to 30% of all jobs. That can include AI eliminating certain jobs and creating other ones while also requiring existing jobs to change their scope. He doubts AI will cause net job loss in Austin because of the city’s diversified economy and collection of innovative tech companies that are poised to benefit from the continued development of Al.
“(Austin is) an innovation tech center; you’re not a routine tech center,” he said. “So the places, I’d be more worried if you were in insurance or back-office finance than I would worry being a tech center. Tech tends to keep moving forward.”
Abernathy expects Austin is in a good position to see steady job growth over the next 10 years, but it may be slower than previous years due to migration trends. Abernathy said that overall domestic and international migration trends in the U.S. have slowed, and that could impact Austin because that’s where the area has seen a lot of its growth.
Written by Sean Hemmersmeier for Austin Business Journal
