Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made a winning move after new data showed The Lone Star State has led the nation in job creation over the past year.
Employment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this week show Texas saw the largest job gains of any state from September 2023 to September 2024, with the addition of 327,400 jobs. In second place was California with an addition of 265,300 jobs over the past year, and Florida ranked third with 204,700 jobs.
“Texas continues to dominate as America’s employment engine,” Abbott said in a statement. “America’s leading businesses are escaping the grip of excessive regulation in other states to gain a competitive business advantage found only in Texas.”
Republicans touted Texas’ business climate as the best in the nation, and said more Texans are working than ever before in the state’s history. Texas now has a workforce of 15.4 million people.
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Abbott’s tenure as governor since 2015 has seen an influx of companies moving their headquarters to the state, which has no personal or corporate income taxes and praised its business-friendly regulations.
Several large companies have left high-tax states and relocated their headquarters to Texas in recent years, including Oracle and Caterpillar, as well as Tesla, SpaceX and Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Heart | Security | Final | Change | Change % |
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TSLA | TESLA INC. | 260.48 | +46.83 |
+21.92% |
They are not alone.
A report published by the New York Federal Reserve earlier this year found that Texas led the nation between 2010 and 2019 in attracting business relocations from other regions of the country.
More than 25,000 companies moved to Texas during that period, bringing more than 281,000 jobs. That offsets the 18,000 companies that left the state and resulted in the loss of about 179,000 jobs. In total, Texas saw a net migration of 7,232 companies and the addition of nearly 103,000 jobs – the highest of any state in the country.
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The report said Texas is attractive to businesses for a number of reasons, including its business-friendly environment such as low taxes and light regulations, its central location on the American continent, growing population and abundant energy resources.
Last week, the Texas Workforce Commission released September employment data showing that not only did Texas increase employment at a faster rate than the U.S. as a whole over the past 12 months, the state also set a new record high for total employment, the number of Texans who are employed, and the size of the Texas labor force.
Texas has led the nation in population growth for the past 18 years. The state’s $2.6 trillion economy is the world’s 8th largest economy by 2023 GDP, larger than Russia, Canada, Italy, Brazil and others.
The Lone State has also won the Governor’s Cup for the most new and expanded corporate facilities projects in the nation for a record-breaking 12 consecutive years, having been ranked the Best State for Business by the nation’s leading CEOs in an annual survey by Chief Executive Magazine for a record-breaking 20 consecutive years.
Texas’ economy is growing faster than the nation with an annual growth rate of 7.4% while the nation is expanding at 2.9% as measured by changes in real gross domestic product (GDP) from 2022 to 2023.
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As of late last month, Texas had added more than 2.4 million jobs since Abbott took office.
“Texas’ unprecedented success in job creation continues to break records time and time again,” said Adriana Cruz, Executive Director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development & Tourism. “When business is successful, all Texans are successful.”
FOX Business’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.