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- The US economy varies in its biggest cities.
- Metro areas such as San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and San Jose have particularly strong economies; Cleveland, Virginia Beach, and Providence are much weaker.
- That's according to our ranking, which ranks metro areas by taking into account their unemployment rate, average weekly wage, job growth rate, GDP per capita, and GDP growth rate.
The source of America's prosperity is its big cities.
Business Insider combined five measures of labor-market and general economic health for the 40 metropolitan statistical areas with the biggest 2017 populations to get a sense of where those big cities' economies stand. Those measures were the unemployment rate, average weekly wage, job growth rate, GDP per capita, and GDP growth rate. By putting those on a common scale and combining them, we were able to get a picture of the overall state of each metro area's economy.
Click here for our detailed sources and methods.
While we didn't include this as a factor in our ranking, we also pointed out some of the Fortune 1000 companies headquartered in those cities, as well as other highlights of the local economy.
Here's how the economies of the 40 biggest cities in the US are doing: