St. George • When it comes to taking top honors as the nation’s best small metro area, St. George has always been the bridesmaid, never the bride.
Until now.
After placing second last year and finishing in the top five every year since 2016, St. George finally topped the ranking as the nation’s best-performing small metropolitan area in this year’s version of the Milken Institute’s “Best-Performing Cities“ report.
“It’s huge for the city of St. George,” said Chad Thomas, the city’s economic development director. “It confirms what we’ve known all along, that we are a great city. St. George is a great place to live, it’s a great place to do business, and we are happy that established institutions like the Milken Institute are taking notice.”
The Milken Institute, a nonpartisan think tank located in Santa Monica, California, produced the annual report that analyzed 411 metropolitan areas nationwide. Approximately half of these areas, including St. George, were categorized as small cities, with populations under 275,000.
Milken researchers used 13 metrics related to short- and long-term trends in job and wage growth, high-tech output, housing affordability and community resilience to rank the cities.
St. George’s jump from second to first place in the rankings was propelled by a boom in the high-tech sector. High-tech gross domestic product in the area surged by more than 106% between 2019 and 2024, with an 8.6% increase recorded in 2024 alone.
The city earned high marks for economic opportunity. Job growth from June 2024 to June 2025, for example, was twice the state’s average, rose faster than the national average and occurred in virtually every sector, including financial activities, construction and health services, the latter comprising just over 17% of the area’s economy.
The city also ranked in the top 25% of cities in broadband access and made significant strides in income inequality, jumping 87 spots from last year, according to the report.
“St. George has achieved outstanding growth across the economy, outpacing the aggregate national five-year employment growth in every major economic sector,” the report states.
St. George Mayor Jimmie Hughes celebrated the news, saying that thanks to the city’s pro-business environment and world-class outdoor amenities, “our community offers an unmatched quality of life and opportunity.”
Thomas credits much of the surge to St. George’s emphasis on bringing better-paying tech jobs to the area and its commitment to Tech Ridge, a 180-acre development atop the mesa where the old municipal airport was located that is now luring more tech companies and top talent to the area.
Southern Utah’s answer to the Wasatch Front’s tech hub Silicon Slopes, Tech Ridge is now home to major technology companies like Zonos and Vasion.
“As we continue to develop Tech Ridge,” Thomas said, “it will help us maintain our economic strength in the future.”
But the report wasn’t all roses for St. George, pinpointing two challenges it said St. George must address: potential water shortages and the lack of affordable housing due to growth.
“If St. George is not able to get its housing affordability problem under control,” Brock Smith, the institute’s director of research, told The Tribune, “that could be a detriment going forward.”