New York Dethrones San Francisco as America's Top Tech Job Market for the First Time
New York City has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as the top U.S. market for tech jobs, ending Silicon Valley's long reign at the top of CBRE's annual "Scoring Tech Talent" report. It is the first time in the report's 13-year history that New York has claimed the No. 1 spot.
CBRE, a major commercial real estate and research firm, tracks tech staffing across 75 markets in the U.S. and Canada. In the latest rankings, New York counted 394,300 tech jobs, edging past the Bay Area's 375,730 (Deadline).
The New York metro added 30,640 tech jobs over the past year, according to The Next Web. The reversal was driven by two forces working in opposite directions: layoffs at Silicon Valley and San Francisco companies shrank the Bay Area's workforce, while New York firms in finance and artificial intelligence expanded theirs.
Despite the high-profile job cuts at major tech companies, the broader picture is one of growth. Total U.S. tech employment rose by 1.8% in the last year, adding 108,760 jobs nationally (Deadline). That is an acceleration from 2024, when CBRE's previous report recorded 1.1% growth, or 64,140 new jobs.
AI is the engine behind most of that growth. The AI sector expanded by 45% over the past year, and AI roles accounted for the majority of new tech job gains. Both San Francisco and New York each added more than 20,000 AI-oriented positions. The surge builds on momentum from 2024, when Bay Area AI job postings hit a record 11,400, up more than 50% year over year, according to CBRE's 2025 report.
What makes the shift notable is how quickly the geography of tech hiring is being rewritten. For over a decade, the Bay Area's dominance in CBRE's rankings went unchallenged. The report now places the top five markets as the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, the New York metro, and Austin — a spread that spans both coasts and crosses an international border.
The return to the office is shaping where these jobs land. Fully remote arrangements for new tech roles have declined as employers move to hybrid schedules of three or more days in person. AI companies, in particular, largely require full-time, in-office work, according to CBRE. In the San Francisco Bay Area, remote job postings fell to 7% as of April 2026, down from 24% in mid-2022. Across all U.S. tech talent postings, the remote share now stands at 18%.
CBRE's separate 2026 Tech Gateway Office Markets report projects tech industry job growth of under 1% for 2026, with the rebound in hiring concentrated in specialised AI talent rather than across the board. So while the sector is still growing, the gains are narrowing — and flowing to the cities and the specialisms that companies need most.
