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Top of the Heap: Texas’ Bright Future in the Job Market

ByBlake Decker

With the start of the 2024-2025 academic year, most people in education view life from the perspective of new beginnings. However, for millions of students across the country, the start of the fall semester actually means their college-level course of study is coming to a close. For these students, they will be hitting the full-time job market in a few short months, a job market for recent college graduates that has seen an increase in unemployment rates from 3.9% in May 2022 to 4.7% in May 2024. As we launch the fifth year of this data blog, we begin a new series that will look forward in terms of the future job market while exploring the current degree and credential productivity landscape at Texas institutions of higher education. This blog post serves as a level-setting introduction to the topic by comparing overall state-level job growth trends in the United States ranging from observed data in 2022 to predicted data in 2034.

Texas Predicted to Lead in Jobs Increase through 2034

Using data from Lightcast, a labor market analytics company, the visualizations below provide state-based trends in terms of both numeric and percentage increase for states that are predicted to see job increases exceeding 300,000 from 2022 to 2034.

Numeric Increase

  • The United States is projected to have a 13% (20.31 million) increase in the number of jobs from 157.96M in 2022 to 178.28M in 2034 in the Lightcast data.
  • Texas is projected to lead all states in terms of job growth through 2034. In 2022, Texas had 13.94M jobs, as the state is projected to have just over 16.77M jobs in 2034, representing a 2.83M increase. Based on the national projections, Texas accounts for almost 14% of the total projected job growth in the United States by 2034.
  • Only California (2.62M) and New York (2.07M) have job increase projections that are higher than 2 million through 2034. Even though Texas’ projected numeric growth is higher than California, the “Golden State” had 34.5% more total jobs than Texas (18.75M in CA versus 13.94M in TX) in 2022. However, the gap between the two states is predicted to decrease to 27.4% by 2034, with California projected to sit at 21.37M jobs and Texas at 16.77M in 2034.
NOTE: Hover over each bar for additional information related to job growth in each state.

Percentage Increase

  • The state of Utah is predicted to have the highest percentage increase in jobs from 2022 to 2034 with a 27.8% increase in the Lightcast data. Utah had 1.75M jobs in 2022 and is predicted to increase to 2.23M in 2034, representing a job growth of 486K between 2022 and 2034.
  • Texas trails Utah and New York in the projected percentage growth category with a projected 20.3% increase in overall jobs from 2022 to 2034, as these three states are the only ones with at least a 20-percent increase in the Lightcast data projections.
  • While California was second in terms of numeric growth, California came in at 13th in terms of percentage growth at just under 14%. Florida, which ranked 4th in numeric growth, is projected to experience 11.5% growth from 2022 to 2034.

So What?

Throughout the course of our blog series, we have seen numerous metrics (birth rates, high school graduates, state-to-state migration, top states for business) where Texas has fared well in comparisons to the national and state-level trends. The jobs data presented above provide another area in which Texas is projected to lead nationally. However, the overall data do not provide meaningful context as to which industries and occupations are projected to thrive in the decade ahead. We will explore these data at a more granular level in the remainder of our blog post series on job projections and alignment of academic credentials in Texas.