Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

The 5 cities with the biggest economic growth in the U.S. right now

Some American cities are growing at a pace most places never reach. SmartAsset found one small city outpacing hundreds of others nationwide

Courtney Rose / Unsplash

Some American cities grow at the ordinary pace of population change, adding a few new subdivisions each year, renovating a mall here and there, or opening a new highway exit. Others change shape entirely within a few years. New employers move in, housing developments spread across what used to be ranchland, and a city's job base and tax rolls swell at a rate that reshapes local schools, roads, and budgets. That second kind of growth reflects an expanding economic capacity rather than lucky timing, and it comes with real costs of its own. Rents climb, traffic worsens, and longtime residents sometimes find their hometown barely recognizable within a decade. But for job seekers, homebuyers, and businesses looking for room to expand, these places represent some of the clearest opportunities in the country right now.

Between 2019 and 2024, some U.S. cities added housing units, workers, and economic output at multiples of the national pace. Nationally, employment and housing growth over that five-year window landed far below what the fastest-moving cities posted, and that difference widened rather than narrowed as the decade progressed. Central Texas and the Mountain West saw some of the largest gains, while much of the Northeast and Rust Belt saw modest or flat growth across the same measures. A single metric rarely tells the full story. A city can add housing without adding jobs, or add jobs without adding people to fill them. The cities that combined strong growth across housing, labor force, and economic output all at once are the ones that stand out most clearly in the data.

SmartAsset built this ranking from a large pool of mid-size and larger American cities, screening first for population above 65,000 residents. From there, each city was scored on how much its economy, housing stock, and workforce had changed over a five-year stretch. Cities that scored highest across all three measures at once made the final cut of 75. That group landed unevenly across the map, with Florida and Texas together accounting for nearly half the entries and the Northeast producing just a single city. Here are the five that came out on top.

Jeffrey W. Spencer / Flickr

No city on SmartAsset's list grew faster over five years than Georgetown, Texas. Housing units in Georgetown grew 34% between 2019 and 2024, and its labor force expanded by the same margin, a rare case of a city adding homes and workers in near-perfect lockstep. Williamson County, home to Georgetown, posted compound annual real GDP growth of 7.7% over that stretch, the highest of any county tied to a city on this list.

That balance between housing and labor force growth matters because it points to sustainable expansion rather than a housing boom outrunning job creation, or the reverse. Georgetown sits roughly 30 miles north of Austin, and........

© Quartz