Superstars, rising stars, and the rest: Pandemic trends and shifts in the geography of tech

This report probes the latest trends in the geography of tech over the past decade and through the pandemic. Among the findings are:

• Growth in key tech industries has been rapid and resilient in the last decade, including through the pandemic. Software publishing and other information services have led the way.
• The tech sector has until recently been concentrating, not decentralizing. Prior to the pandemic, tech was adding jobs across much of America, but it wasn’t really “spreading out” in terms of more cities increasing their shares of the sector’s jobs. Instead, coastal “superstars” like the Bay Area and Seattle predominated.
• With that said, the pandemic years seem to be distributing somewhat more tech activity into a wider set of places. This shift does not represent a massive reorientation of tech work into the heartland during the pandemic. However, the data in this report shows that employment growth slowed in some of the biggest tech “superstars” and increased in other midsized and smaller markets, including smaller quality-of-life meccas and college towns.