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New York City has surpassed San Francisco as the country’s top market for tech talent, according to CBRE’s “Scoring Tech Talent” report, the first time New York has come out ahead of the Bay Area in the report’s 13-year history.
The New York metro area’s tech workforce grew to 394,300 in 2025, up 8.4%, or roughly 30,640 jobs, since 2022. San Francisco’s tech employment, by contrast, fell 6% over the same period to 375,730, a decline steep enough to flip the rankings even without New York adding jobs at an extraordinary pace.
“What really pushed New York past the San Francisco Bay Area has been the job reductions that we’ve seen [in San Francisco], with a lot of the announced layoffs,” said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s tech insights center, attributing the shift as much to Bay Area contraction as to New York’s own growth.
The two markets look structurally different beneath the headline numbers. In San Francisco, 61% of tech talent works directly within the tech industry itself. In New York, only 34% do, while another 21% hold tech roles embedded inside the city’s finance, insurance and real estate sector, a reflection of how deeply technology work has woven itself into Wall Street rather than existing as a separate industry cluster.
AI-specific demand is a major driver of the shift. AI roles grew 45% over the past year, with both cities adding more than 20,000 AI-oriented jobs; San Francisco still leads specifically in AI talent even as New York leads in overall tech employment. That AI growth is showing up directly in New York’s commercial real estate: Manhattan recorded 800,000 square feet of AI-related office demand in the second quarter of 2026 alone, more than all of 2025 combined, with AI office leasing for the year already topping 1.8 million square feet, up from 1.4 million in all of 2025.
Part of the dynamic favors New York structurally: AI companies have largely required full-time, in-person work rather than the remote-friendly arrangements common elsewhere in tech, a policy that plays to New York’s dense, office-centric labor market in a way it doesn’t for more remote-flexible Bay Area employers.
