Provo-Orem metro area falls to 15th in 2025 rankings of best-performing cities

Carlene Coombs, Daily Herald file photo
A view of "Y" Mountain in Provo on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024.After consecutive years of top-five finishes, the Provo-Orem metropolitan area took a step back in the Milken Institute’s Best-Performing Cities Index for 2025.
The metro area finished 15th in the annual rankings mapping economic growth across the U.S., trailing a fifth-place finish in 2024 and a first-place finish in 2023.
The drop was due to a high-tech slowdown that affected job and wage growth, said Maggie Switek, senior director of the research department at the California-based economic think tank.
“What we saw was a drop in the one-year job growth,” Switek said. “Job growth between 2022 and 2023 was relatively slow as compared to other years. And the high-tech (gross domestic product), so the output of the high-tech sector really diminished in Provo over 2023, which, of course, then affected performance in terms of wage growth, since this is a high-wage sector.”
The tech industry experienced massive layoffs in 2023 and 2024, in part due to inflation, economic downturns and advancements in artificial intelligence.
According to Layoffs.fyi, 1,193 tech companies laid off 264,220 employees in 2023, and 545 tech companies laid off 152,664 employees in 2024. Some of the biggest tech companies in the world were impacted, including Meta, Google, Tesla, Microsoft and Amazon.
Because of the high concentration of technology companies in Utah County, the downturn affected the area more than the average city, Switek said.
Provo-based Qualtrics, for instance, laid off 14% of its workforce in October 2023.
“When the high-tech sector is performing well, as it was in 2021, Provo-Orem was also growing very, very strongly,” Switek said. “More recently, as the growth in the high-tech sector slowed down — and actually there were a number of layoffs in the industry — that affected the metropolitan area more strongly.”
But Switek believes the tech industry will bounce back.
“If we look into the future, the positive that I will say is that it’s starting to be in the rear view-mirror for Provo,” she said. “It seems like the worst of it has (already) hit.”
Milken’s rankings are based on 13 metrics that fall into three categories: labor market performance, high-tech impact and access to economic opportunities.
On the listing of large U.S. cities, Raleigh, North Carolina, took the top spot for 2025, while Ogden-Clearfield was second and Salt Lake City was third. Among small cities, St. George placed second.
Despite Provo-Orem’s drop in job growth, the metro area still scored well in access to economic opportunities, as well as more niche categories including income distribution and economic resilience.
“(Provo-Orem) continues to be the No. 1-ranked city among large cities in our report in terms of the percentage of households with resilience to natural and economic disasters, so the ability of the households to bounce back from the disaster,” Switek said.
Utah metro areas have routinely landed high on Milken’s annual lists in recent years, thanks to high economic growth and low costs.
“The tax regulation in Utah is favorable for businesses,” Switek said, “but also costs of energy, costs of labor, office rental space is relatively cheap (compared) to the rest of the nation, and all of these have been major attractors of businesses in the past years.”