It is the second year CompTIA has issued the rankings, and the second year Raleigh has placed at No. 2. CompTIA cited the City of Oaks’ cost of living and growing number of job openings as its biggest advantages.
Raleigh was beaten by Austin, Texas, for the top spot — an outcome that is growing ever familiar for the city, having lost out on several potential new tech-related expansions when competing with the capital of the Lone Star State in recent years.
The report ranked metro areas across four different measurements: cost of living, number of open IT positions, projected job growth in one year and projected growth in five years.
CompTIA, which runs certification and training programs, said it created the report to help IT professionals determine what cities offer the best opportunities. With tech jobs being in such high demand across the country, IT professionals have a lot of freedom to choose where they want to live. CompTIA said IT workers often cite cost of living and weather as two of the biggest factors in their choice of where to live.
The trade group said it got its data for the report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the data analytics company Burning Glass Technologies.
Specifically, it was Raleigh’s relative inexpensiveness that won it a lot of points in the rankings.
The cost of living in Raleigh is 4.6% lower than the national average, CompTIA said, and IT workers here get paid about $3,582 more each year with a median salary for IT professionals coming in at $91,859.
And the opportunity to land one of those jobs keeps growing. CompTIA found that there were 35,589 IT jobs posted in Raleigh between August 2019 and July 2019 and that the number of IT jobs was expected to grow by 9% over the next five years.
And it wasn’t just the eastern half of the Triangle that performed well in the rankings. The Durham-Chapel Hill metro area placed 13th in the list, up two spots from last year.
However, it is more expensive to live in western half of the Triangle than in Raleigh, with the cost of living in the Durham-Chapel Hill metro area only 1.4% lower than the national average, according to CompTIA.
That means the $91,156 that the median IT professional in Durham and Chapel Hill makes per year doesn’t stretch quite as far as it does in Raleigh. The number of people commuting back and forth between the two halves of the Triangle might make these differences less noticeable in real life.
The job outlook for Durham and Chapel Hill was also much more conservative than in Raleigh. While Raleigh’s tech jobs were expected to grow by 9% over the next five years, Durham and Chapel Hill was projected to grow by just 3%.
This year’s ranking also represented a fall back to Earth for North Carolina’s biggest city, Charlotte.
Charlotte, which was No. 1 in CompTIA’s list last year, fell to No. 6 this year. The trade group said Charlotte fell in the rankings because its long-term outlook for IT-job growth declined, from 11% over the next five years to 9%.
15 Best Tech Metro Areas
Austin, TexasRaleigh
San Jose, California
Seattle
San Francisco
Charlotte
Dallas
Atlanta
Denver
Huntsville, Alabama
Washington, D.C.
Columbus, Ohio
Durham-Chapel Hill
Boulder, Colorado
Boston
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