Toronto's skyline

Toronto rises to 3rd in the CBRE’s 2019 Scoring Tech Talent report based on strong job growth and low costs. Ottawa placed 19th, while Hamilton and Waterloo rank among North America’s top three up-and-coming tech markets.

Toronto is the fastest growing tech market in North America. With 80,100 tech jobs created, Toronto’s tech job growth was greater than the job growth in New York City,Seattle, and Boston combined.

This comes from the CBRE’s 2019 Scoring Tech Talent report, which ranked Toronto as the third strongest tech market overall, rising the ranks from last year to surpass Washington, DC. Ottawa also scored on the ranking, placing 19th.

“We hear about tech more and more, but in a thriving city like Toronto, the impact of tech companies and the growing influence of tech talent cannot be overstated. Tech job growth has a multiplier effect in the economy,” says CBRE Canada Vice Chairman Paul Morassutti. “Toronto, San Francisco and Seattle are comfortably mentioned in the same sentence and are attracting the best in the industry.”

According to the report, Toronto also offers high quality talent for a fraction of the cost. Comparable tech talent in Toronto costs less than half that of San Francisco and about 50% less than either New York or Seattle.

Toronto had the third lowest cost of doing business overall, and both Toronto and Ottawa are in fact more inexpensive to do business in than any American city listed. This is due to large savings on both office rents and talent costs.

Toronto leads the ‘brain gain’

While some cities on the list did not produce enough jobs for all their graduates, Toronto created over 57,000 more jobs than graduates over the previous five years, making it the number one “brain gain” destination in North America.

Ottawa ranked as having the second highest tech employment concentration. 9.9% of Ottawa’s workforce is employed in the tech sector, only 0.1% behind San Francisco, while Toronto ranked third.

Hamilton and the Waterloo Region were also identified as two of the fastest growing opportunity markets. Hamilton’s tech employment grew by 52% over the past five years while Waterloo’s grew by 40%. “Opportunity markets offer quality labour pools and affordability that supports rapid scalability,” Morassutti said. “These markets can be ideal for small-scale operations, startups and tech jobs with non-tech employers like banks, media and services firms.”