Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is taking a victory lap after new data shows the Lone Star State has led the nation in job creation over the past year.
Employment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this week showed Texas has seen the largest job gains of any state from September 2023 to September 2024, adding 327,400 jobs. Coming in second was California with 265,300 jobs added over the past year, and Florida was No. 3 at 204,700.
“Texas continues to dominate as America’s jobs engine,” Abbott said in a statement. “America’s leading businesses are fleeing the stranglehold of over-regulation in other states for the competitive business advantages found only in Texas.”
The Republican touted Texas’ business climate as the best in the nation, and said more Texans are now working than ever before in the state’s history. Texas now has a workforce of 15.4 million.
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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 tax and has touted its business-friendly regulations.
Several major companies have fled high-tax states and relocated their headquarters in Texas in recent years, including Oracle and Caterpillar, as well as Elon Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X.
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They’re not alone.
A report published by the New York Federal Reserve earlier this year found Texas led the nation between 2010 and 2019 in attracting businesses relocating from other parts of the country.
More than 25,000 establishments relocated to Texas during that period, bringing more than 281,000 jobs with them. That offset the 18,000 establishments that left the state, costing about 179,000 jobs. In total, Texas saw a net migration of 7,232 firms and an addition of nearly 103,000 jobs — the highest among any other state in the country.
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The report said Texas appeals to businesses for a number of reasons, including its business-friendly environment such as low taxes and light regulation, central location within the continental U.S., growing population and abundant energy resources.
Last week, the Texas Workforce Commission released September employment data showing Texas not only grew jobs at a faster rate than the U.S. as a whole over the last 12 months, the state also set new records for total jobs, the number of Texans working and the size of the Texas labor force.
Texas has led the nation in population growth over the last 18 years. The state’s $2.6 trillion economy is the eighth-largest economy in the world based on 2023 GDP, which is larger than Russia, Canada, Italy, Brazil and others.
The Lone Star State has also won the Governor’s Cup for the most new and expanded corporate facility projects in the nation for a record-breaking 12 years in a row, and has been ranked the Best State for Business by the nation’s top CEOs in the annual survey by Chief Executive Magazine for a record-breaking 20 years in a row.
The Texas economy expanded at an annual rate of 7.4%, while the nation expanded at 2.9%, as measured by the change in real gross domestic product (GDP) from 2022 to 2023.
And as of the end of last month, Texas has 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 Economic Development & Tourism Office. “When businesses succeed, all Texans succeed.”
FOX Business’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.
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