--- title: "New York now has more tech workers than the Bay Area, but it is not the top market" description: "CBRE's annual tech talent survey puts New York's tech workforce at 394,300 against the Bay Area's 375,730, the first time New York has been larger in the 13 years the report has run. San Francisco still ranks first overall on CBRE's index, which is the distinction most of the coverage has skipped." category: "Tech" category_url: https://boursel.com/category/tech author: "Sofia Marchetti" published: 2026-08-21T11:02:00.000Z updated: 2026-08-21T11:02:00.000Z canonical: https://boursel.com/article/new-york-now-has-more-tech-workers-than-the-bay-area-but-it-is-not-the-top-marke tags: ["tech-jobs", "commercial-real-estate", "new-york", "san-francisco", "artificial-intelligence"] --- # New York now has more tech workers than the Bay Area, but it is not the top market CBRE's annual tech talent survey puts New York's tech workforce at 394,300 against the Bay Area's 375,730, the first time New York has been larger in the 13 years the report has run. San Francisco still ranks first overall on CBRE's index, which is the distinction most of the coverage has skipped. New York's tech workforce has passed the San Francisco Bay Area's for the first time. [CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent report](https://www.cbre.com/insights/books/scoring-tech-talent-2026) puts New York at 394,300 tech workers in 2025 against 375,730 in the Bay Area, [a first in the 13 years the survey has run](https://commercialobserver.com/2026/08/new-york-city-san-francisco-technology-labor-market-cbre/). Two things are worth separating before drawing a conclusion, because most of the coverage has run them together. New York is now the larger market by headcount. San Francisco still ranks first on CBRE's overall index, which is a composite of 13 measures rather than a count of workers. ## The movement New York added 30,640 tech jobs between 2022 and 2025, a gain of 8.4%. The Bay Area lost 23,900 over the same three years, a decline of 6%. The crossover is the product of both moving at once, and of a starting gap that was never as large as the industry's centre of gravity suggested. Concentration tells the more interesting story. Tech accounts for [4.2% of total employment in New York and more than 10% in San Francisco](https://commercialobserver.com/2026/08/new-york-city-san-francisco-technology-labor-market-cbre/). New York is a larger economy in which tech is one sector among many; San Francisco is a tech economy with a city attached. ## Where the workers actually sit The composition data explains why the headcount comparison misleads. In San Francisco, 61% of tech workers are employed by tech companies. In New York, only 34% are, while 21% hold tech roles inside finance, insurance and real estate firms. Those are different labour markets wearing the same label. A quantitative developer at a hedge fund and a platform engineer at a startup both count as tech talent in CBRE's tally, but they are not substitutes for each other, and they respond to different cycles. New York's dispersion is a source of resilience when the sector contracts, and a reason its tech employment is less exposed to venture funding conditions. ## What the index measures CBRE scores markets on 13 metrics covering the depth, cost and quality of the labour pool, weighting talent concentration heavily and labour costs more than office rents, on the reasoning that companies spend far more on people than on space. That construction is what keeps San Francisco first despite the smaller workforce. Density of skills, quality of the pool and the presence of the highest-paid roles score above raw headcount. Read correctly, the report says New York has more tech workers and San Francisco has a better one, on CBRE's definition of better. It is also a commercial real estate product, published by the largest brokerage in the business, and it measures what landlords want to know: where tenants will need space. ## The leasing consequence That is where the report has teeth. Manhattan recorded [1.8 million square feet of AI-related office leasing in the first half of 2026, including 800,000 square feet in the second quarter alone](https://commercialobserver.com/2026/08/new-york-city-san-francisco-technology-labor-market-cbre/), more than the whole of 2025. Anthropic took 465,630 square feet at 330 Hudson Street; Google renewed 410,556 square feet. San Francisco remains the larger AI office market in aggregate, accounting for roughly two-thirds of AI leasing since 2019. But the direction of the marginal lease has changed, and in an office market still working through the vacancy left by remote work, the marginal lease is what sets the rent. For companies deciding where to grow, the trade is legible enough: New York offers a deeper and more varied pool at lower concentration risk, San Francisco offers density of specialists and the network effects that come with it. What the report does not say, and cannot, is which of those matters more for a technology whose labour requirements are still being worked out. ## Sources - [Scoring Tech Talent 2026](https://www.cbre.com/insights/books/scoring-tech-talent-2026) - [New York City's tech labor market has surpassed San Francisco: report](https://commercialobserver.com/2026/08/new-york-city-san-francisco-technology-labor-market-cbre/) - [New York unseats San Francisco as the top market for tech talent, CBRE reports](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/new-york-san-francisco-tech-talent-cbre.html)