CBRE published its 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report this week. The headline number: the New York metro area now employs 394,300 tech workers, against the San Francisco Bay Area’s 375,730. Thirteen years of the study, and it is the first time New York has finished on top.
That is a head count, not a verdict. On CBRE’s actual scorecard — 13 weighted metrics across 50 North American markets covering wages, workforce concentration, education pipeline and real estate cost — the Bay Area still finishes first at 81.9, Seattle second at 74.37 and Toronto third at 72.73. New York places fourth, at 70.38. It has the most tech workers and the fourth-best tech workforce.
The interesting part is who hired them.
The employer changed, not the map
Since 2022, the finance, insurance and real estate sector added 90,530 tech jobs across the United States. The high-tech industry itself shed 21,262 over the same stretch. New York gained 30,640 tech positions; the Bay Area lost 23,900, a 6% contraction.
Read those two lines together and the crown looks less like a migration than a reclassification. Engineers did not all move east. Banks, insurers and asset managers hired engineers where banks, insurers and asset managers already are — and tech companies, staring at a cost base built for 2021, stopped.
CBRE flags the national version of the same trend: the tech industry accounted for a record 31% of all US job cuts through June, up from 13% for the whole of last year. Inside those companies, AI-related roles are being added while non-AI roles are eliminated. The mix has flipped; the net is still negative.
Our take: A “tech job” is now, increasingly, a job at a company that is not a tech company. That is the structural shift buried inside a commercial real estate report. If you hire engineers, your competition is no longer three startups down the street — it is an institution with a bigger balance sheet, a longer horizon and no burn rate to explain. And if your skills are not AI-adjacent, the growth is in the industries that used to be the fallback.
The cost line nobody quotes
CBRE also prices what it costs to run a 500-person tech company for a year in wages and office rent. The Bay Area: $90.6 million. New York and Seattle sit second and third, separated by roughly $24,000, both near $73.9 million. That is about a $17 million annual gap between first place and second — before anyone argues about talent quality.
The Seattle detail deserves a paragraph of its own, because it shows what a mature market looks like from the inside. Average tech wages there hit $190,050 in 2024, second only to the Bay Area’s $211,048. Office vacancy hit 28.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — the highest of all 50 markets — despite 1.9 million square feet leased by AI companies in the region since 2023. And the metro’s 20-something population shrank between 2019 and 2024 while its share of 30-somethings grew to the largest of any market in the study. High pay, empty desks, mid-career magnet, thinning entry pipeline.
One caveat worth stating plainly: the market-by-market workforce figures run through 2025. This year’s layoffs are not in these rankings yet.
What to watch
- Whether finance-sector tech hiring holds through 2026, or whether 2022–2025 was a one-cycle catch-up on modernisation budgets that is now largely spent.
- Bay Area head count in next year’s edition — 2026’s cuts land there, not here.
- Whether the AI-skills premium keeps splitting tech employment into two separate labour markets inside the same job title.
- Entry-level hiring in the expensive markets. If the pipeline keeps thinning, a wage gap stops being a sign of strength.
The crown moved. The scorecard did not. Both facts are in the same report, and only one of them made the headlines.