The New Geography of Manufacturing Jobs
Coastal collapse and a Sun Belt surge
Where in the United States are manufacturing jobs growing? Where are they in decline? What do these trends predict for the future of employment in the sector?
When we asked these questions last year, the answer was simple: Manufacturing jobs are growing the fastest in the same places where all jobs are growing the fastest, notably in the Sun Belt. The manufacturing jobs recovery was simultaneously failing to keep up in the Rust Belt, the region that had experienced the biggest absolute job losses in the sector as the labor market deindustrialized over the past five decades.
Nationwide, by 2023 manufacturing jobs had returned to their pre-Covid numbers, the first time in half a century that manufacturing employment had fully bounced back from a recession. But their recovery nonetheless lagged well behind the growth of jobs in the rest of the economy.
We now have new data, updated through December 2024, that allows us to see a more detailed map of how the gains and losses of these jobs are changing throughout the country in the years since the start of the pandemic.
The result is a solidifying picture of a new and complex economic geography of manufacturing jobs. Every broad region we looked at — Coastal metros, the Mountain West, the Sun Belt, and Legacy metros — had less manufacturing job growth in the last five years than in the five years before the pandemic. But the performances of each region nonetheless varied widely. The Sun Belt continues to shine, the Rust Belt trends are mixed, and the American coasts are failing to prevent outright decline.
Here is what we found:
1) Coastal metros are losing manufacturing jobs, and the pace of decline is accelerating.
Between 2019 and 2024, the Coastal region suffered by far the biggest net loss of manufacturing jobs out of any of the four regions. The Coastal metro areas studied in this analysis are Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York City, Boston, and Washington D.C.
Combined, the Coastal metros had roughly 85,000 fewer manufacturing jobs at the end of last year than in 2019, a decline of five percent. In the overall American economy, meanwhile, manufacturing jobs grew by 0.6 percent over that same period. (These are total figures for the five-year period. No figures in this article, including in the charts, are annualized.)
The Los Angeles metro area alone accounts for more than a third of this net loss, with 40,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in 2024 compared to 2019. Los Angeles, in fact, lost nearly 15,000 manufacturing jobs in just the past year — the biggest loss of any metro area. Although Los Angeles remains home to the nation's largest manufacturing sector based on employment, its lead over the next biggest manufacturing job market, Chicago, has narrowed considerably over the past decade.
The Coastal decline in the past five years since the start of the pandemic represents a shift from stagnation to outright decline, with Coastal manufacturing jobs having decreased by 0.2 percent during the 2014-2019 period. While the broader Coastal area saw negative growth in both periods, certain metro areas experienced dramatic shifts. San Francisco, for instance, enjoyed a robust 15.7 percent surge in manufacturing jobs pre-pandemic, only to see a 1.1 percent drop recently. Portland, Oregon, followed a similar trajectory, shifting from a 7.2 percent gain to a 6.2 percent loss.
And the decline accelerated last year, when net manufacturing jobs in the coasts fell by 37,000 representing a 2.2 percent decline from 2023.
2) The Sun Belt keeps shining, especially in Texas.
Sun Belt metro areas rebounded the quickest from the pandemic-induced recession, experiencing a surge in job growth that widened the gap between them and the metro areas in the three other regions.
Sun Belt metro areas were unambiguously the primary drivers of manufacturing job creation from 2019 to 2024, enjoying net growth of 127,000 jobs. This region includes all metro areas below the 36°30’ parallel from 15 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Southern California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
Within the Sun Belt, the state of Texas did especially well. It is home to the metro area with the most manufacturing jobs created in the country last year, Dallas, in addition to the metro areas with the third and fourth most jobs created, Houston and San Antonio.
3) Manufacturing jobs in the Mountain West have climbed since the pandemic, but the growth rate has slowed.
The Mountain West is comprised of metro areas in Eastern California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.
The pace of manufacturing job growth in the Mountain West has declined from a total of 11.6 percent growth in the five years before the pandemic to a total of 5.7 percent in the five years since. This slowdown has been especially noticeable in Oregon, where every metro area either transitioned to negative growth or experienced a significant decline in its growth rate.
Among large metro areas, Boise, Idaho, enjoyed the fastest growth, with 9.9 percent more jobs in 2024 than in 2019.
4) The experience of Legacy metros — including those in the Rust Belt — has been mixed.
The Legacy Region encompasses all metropolitan areas within the Midwest, mid-South, Great Lakes region, and northern New England.
Approximately half of Legacy metros finished the year with manufacturing job levels higher than their 2019 baseline, the other half below.
Last year, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Baltimore experienced robust year-over-year growth in manufacturing, alongside smaller metro areas such as Lansing, MI, Madison, WI, and Albany, NY. While Legacy metro areas as a whole are not seeing impressive growth, these examples are signs that the decline is beginning to reverse in certain locations. The success of Indianapolis is especially notable, with the metro area having reached its highest number of manufacturing jobs since before the Great Recession.
Overall, Legacy metro areas have nearly returned to their pre-pandemic baseline for employment growth, though it has largely stagnated since 2022.
5) Both the top 10 and bottom 10 metro areas by manufacturing jobs growth last year included surprising counterpoints to the wider trends.
Defying the struggles of other Coastal cities and towns, the Washington, DC metro area demonstrated robust manufacturing growth. Combined with neighboring Baltimore, Washington has created a super-region for manufacturing job growth in the Mid-Atlantic with almost 5,000 new jobs last year.
Meanwhile, it was no surprise that the Coastal Region occupied six places in the bottom 10 of metro areas last year. What was surprising was that two major Sun Belt areas, Atlanta and Miami, did make the list, each having recorded significant drops in manufacturing jobs.
APPENDIX: DATA SOURCES
This analysis uses BLS State and Metro Area Employment, Hours, and Earnings (SAE) data for metro-level manufacturing employment, rather than the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), used previously. SAE data offers greater timeliness (1-2 month lag versus 6 months for QCEW) but relies on smaller sample sizes and modeling techniques that may lead to significant revisions. QCEW provides more detailed and comprehensive employment data at state and county levels.