CBRE published the 13th edition of Scoring Tech Talent on August 18. Three days later CNBC turned it into the week’s most-shared labor story: New York’s metro tech workforce reached 394,300 against the San Francisco Bay Area’s 375,730, the first time New York has led in the 13 years of the study.
That headline is close to useless if you are the one looking for work. The numbers that matter sit further into the report.
The hiring market split in two
AI roles made up 31% of available US tech talent job postings in June 2026. At the 2022 hiring peak the share was 11%. In the Bay Area it went from 20% to 57%.
Over the same stretch, non-AI tech postings fell 60% nationally and 73% in the Bay Area.
Read those two lines together or you will read them wrong. “AI is now 31% of postings” sounds like new opportunity appeared. What happened is the denominator collapsed. Both markets did post roughly a third more AI jobs than they did at the 2022 peak, so the growth is real. But the thing carrying that 31% is the disappearance of everything else.
For a working backend engineer, QA lead, or IT manager, the correct reading of this week’s news is not that New York passed San Francisco. It is that the market you actually apply into shed 60% of its postings in two years, and 73% if you live in the Bay Area.
The buyer changed industry
CBRE breaks the change by sector since 2022. Finance, insurance and real estate added 90,530 tech jobs. Professional services added about 66,000. Transport, warehousing and wholesale added about 66,000. The high-tech industry subtracted 21,262.
New York did not poach San Francisco. Banks and insurers out-recruited software companies, and New York holds more banks and insurers than anywhere else. Finance alone added close to three times as many US tech jobs as New York’s entire metro gain.
This changes what you do rather than what you think. The same machine learning role that sat inside a software company in 2022 now more often sits inside an insurer, a logistics operator, or a hospital system. The job exists, the hiring manager changed, and so did the domain knowledge the interview tests for. Anyone still applying only to tech companies has volunteered out of most of the last three years of job creation.
Colin Yasukochi, who runs CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, told reporters the Bay Area should stay the central location for the AI industry and for innovation. That is compatible with the numbers above. The Bay Area lost the general tech base and kept the AI layer.
The premium is compressing
The tech industry wage premium over the US average fell to 15% in 2024 from 18% in 2023. CBRE attributes the compression to non-tech employers bidding for the same workers.
Which runs backwards until you look at supply. More buyers should raise the price. It fell because the sellers arrived at the same time, laid off from the industry that used to be the only bidder. Talent that commanded a premium for being wanted by one industry now costs less because it is wanted by all of them. A specialist input became a general one, and general inputs price like general inputs.
One more number belongs in the same file. Only nine of CBRE’s 50 markets created more tech jobs than they graduated tech students. The top two net graduate exporters were the Bay Area and Washington DC. The highest-ranked tech talent market in North America is running a labor surplus.
The flow is far ahead of the stock
Now put two more figures side by side.
Tech workers with AI skills across the US and Canada grew 45% year over year to 751,000 as of mid-2026. That sounds enormous. The total North American tech talent pool is 7.6 million, so 751,000 is under 10%.
AI is 31% of postings and under 10% of the working population. The Bay Area gap is wider still: 57% of local postings against 26% of local tech workers carrying AI skills, better than two to one.
Gaps like that close two ways. People learn the work, or people type the word. CBRE builds its AI-specialty counts from LinkedIn members self-reporting occupation and machine learning skills, which the report states plainly. A Stanford and Revelio Labs team compared archived pre-2023 profiles against live ones and found 30% more AI references inside identical work histories, some of it retrofitted into job titles that never carried it.
So 751,000 measures how many people say so. The 31% and the 60% come from Lightcast posting data, which measures what employers actually do. When the two disagree, follow the employers.
What to do with this if you are employed
Three things carry.
Do not judge your own market by the aggregate. US tech talent employment still grew 1.8% in 2025, worth 108,760 jobs, which looks stable. The same year, employers cut 1.21 million jobs, up from 761,358 in 2024. Stability in the total is churn netting out, and the total tells you nothing about which side of the churn you sit on. Hays reported permanent placement fees down 12% and temp down 5% on August 20, which is the same fact from the recruiter’s seat (our coverage).
Follow the buyer, not the industry. Data scientist roles grew 12.4% in 2025, adding 29,000 positions, and finance led that growth rather than tech. Computer and information systems manager roles added 24,600. Technology and engineering roles added 15,030, and 95% of the high-tech industry’s contribution to that came from manufacturing rather than software. Applied Materials was hiring in exactly that shape this month, adding people on the factory side rather than the office side (our coverage).
Weight industry mix above location. More than half of Bay Area tech workers are employed inside the tech industry itself, against roughly a third in New York. A single-industry labor market swings with that industry’s capital cycle, and your own earnings cycle does not have to be in phase with it. Check who signs the paychecks in a city before you check the median salary.
A last note on the headline itself. New York leads by 18,570 workers, under 5% of the Bay Area’s base, on estimates built from survey data, and one revision closes it. CBRE’s own scorecard still ranks the Bay Area first and New York fourth, a top six that has not moved in a year. The crown everyone shared this week is not in the index that CBRE actually publishes.
