In January, the Empowering American Cities collaboration between the Kenan Institute and Fifth Third Bank released its 2025 Outlook, which features projected GDP growth rates for 150 microeconomies across the United States. Nationally, we expect a slowdown ahead, with policy uncertainty, uneven housing starts and inflationary pressures dragging down job creation and consumer spending in 2025. Despite weaker growth, our data indicate that every one of the country’s 150 largest Extended Metropolitan Areas (EMAs) will see GDP growth in 2025. 

Yet this modest expansion will be experienced differently from one EMA to the next. Economic headwinds and policy uncertainty will hit some microeconomies more than others, while some of the country’s top-performing EMAs will achieve solid growth in 2025. 

Who are these high achievers?

Who Are Our Top EMA Growers of 2025?

Of the 50 largest EMAs in the United States, we project that the following will be the top 10 performers in terms of economic growth in 2025:

1. Austin
2. San Francisco Bay Area
3. Seattle
4. Raleigh and Durham
5. Nashville
6. Salt Lake City
7. Dallas
8. San Antonio
9. Portland
10. Phoenix

Big Tech EMAs Remain at the Top

The top seven EMAs in GDP growth remain unchanged from 2024 to 2025, with Austin retaining the top spot, followed by the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle in second and third, respectively. Big tech still reigns supreme. 

As macroeconomic headwinds and policy uncertainty create a drag on economic growth in every EMA, 2025 is a test of resiliency and perseverance. Demonstrating what it takes to instill resilience in a region, Austin was one of a very few US cities that lowered housing costs in 2024, by fostering a multiyear apartment-building boom. Amid otherwise inflationary conditions, these homebuilding efforts helped rein in the cost of living for residents and polished the EMA’s reputation to a sheen for prospective transplants. 

Phoenix snuck into the top 10, displacing Charlotte, which exhibited an especially pronounced contraction in new housing permits and anticipates job losses stemming from its large financial sector. As a result, Charlotte tumbled three spots in our rankings, from eighth to 11^th. 

In a year when EMAs must hunker down and find growth under less-than-favorable conditions, those that jump up the rankings of our 2025 GDP expansion list are the economies that slow down the least. The EMA encompassing Kansas City, MO, and Kansas City, KS, is projected to decelerate only 0.5%, giving it a tidy 2025 expansion of 1.9% and raising its position nine spots in our rankings to median. The GDP growth rate for the Boston EMA – which includes all of Rhode Island and parts of Connecticut and New Hampshire – will take only a 0.6 percentage point drop, from 2.7% to 2.1%. That allows it to leap eight spots to 18^th. 

Both EMAs exhibit strong positive swings in new housing permits from 2024 to 2025, and both weather the national employment slowdown well in our model.

The 2025 rankings, which are based on our model’s forecast, are compared with our latest estimates for 2024, which are based on a complete year of realized underlying economic statistics. (Official 2024 GDP numbers will be released in December.)

2025 Growth Estimates for the Largest 50 EMAs

Below is the full list of 2025 GDP growth estimates for the largest 50 EMAs along with the change in growth and rank from the previous year. By clicking on each column, you can sort the table by that column’s variable. For example, click on the “Change in Growth” column to sort ascending, click again to sort descending, and see which EMA economies slow down the most and which slow down the least from 2024 to 2025.

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