According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent numbers, metropolitan Atlanta added roughly 58,700 jobs over the past 12 months, a 2.12% bump in employment.
The region has comfortably outpaced the national average for much of the economic expansion since the Great Recession and is projected to continue to do so throughout the rest of this year.
Professional and business services led the way in growth over the past year, as Atlanta added 17,500 jobs in this cohort. Overall, with small net reductions in the financial activities and information sectors, office-using employment grew by 13,800 jobs, or roughly a 1.75% increase.
While Atlanta has seen office-using employment slow, the market is on stable footing. From 2010 to 2018, Atlanta added the sixth-highest number of office-using jobs in the nation on a nominal basis, almost 170,000 high-paying jobs. The region boasted numbers higher than Los Angeles with 159,000, Boston with 140,000 and Washington, D.C., with 100,300.
White-collar employment is expected to continue growing over the next few years, as major corporations add thousands of jobs to the area. Investment firm BlackRock, health insurer Anthem and Norfolk Southern Railway are looking to add thousands of high-paying jobs to midtown, arguably Atlanta’s epicenter of corporate relocations and expansions.
Elsewhere in the region, insurance company State Farm, accounting software company LeaseQuery, and Arby’s owner Inspire Brands are in the process of adding thousands of jobs to Perimeter Center. Thyssenkrupp Elevators is expected to hire 600 employees in Cumberland and Ameris Bancorp plans to add 300 positions in Buckhead.
The addition of tens of thousands of high-paying jobs has been a boon to Atlanta’s office market, particularly for high-end properties in the region’s well-positioned markets. For example, midtown and Buckhead will have absorbed roughly 4.6 million and 2.7 million square feet of high-quality space, respectively, by the end of this year.
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