Ottawa fell to 14th place in CBRE’s latest rankings of North American tech hubs, the second straight year the region has lost ground due to sluggish job growth in its tech sector. The real estate firm’s 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report released Tuesday ranks 50 North American markets according to each city’s ability to attract […]
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Ottawa fell to 14th place in CBRE’s latest rankings of North American tech hubs, the second straight year the region has lost ground due to sluggish job growth in its tech sector.
The real estate firm’s 2026 Scoring Tech Talent report released Tuesday ranks 50 North American markets according to each city’s ability to attract and grow tech talent. The survey measures more than a dozen metrics, including tech graduation rates, tech-job concentration, tech labour pool size and labour and real estate costs, among other factors.
Ottawa dropped three positions from its 11th place finish in the 2025 report and four spots from 2024. The region placed fifth among Canadian cities in this year’s rankings after Toronto, which held steady at No. 3, Vancouver, which moved up one spot to No. 9, Waterloo Region, and Montreal, which rose from 15th place last year to No. 11.
The San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle retained their hold on the top two spots. Three other Canadian cities — Calgary (No. 15), Quebec City (No. 37) and Edmonton (No. 42) — also cracked the top 50.
“Having six markets in the top 15 and eight cities in the top 50 is impressive for a country our size,” CBRE Canada Research managing director Marc Meehan said in a news release Tuesday.
“Canada has been the dominant growth story for tech talent over the past five years, with many U.S. and Canadian tech firms tapping into the high quality and comparatively affordable talent on offer here. Tech employment growth is resurgent, and Canadian markets are leading the way forward.”
CBRE’s report said Ottawa’s tech labour force increased 0.8 per cent from 2022 to 2025, growing by just 800 jobs. Meanwhile, CBRE said more than 7,500 students graduated with tech-related post-secondary degrees in Ottawa between 2022 and 2024.
By contrast, Calgary took top spot in the job-creation category with three-year growth of 56 per cent, gaining nearly 29,000 jobs from 2022-25. Overall, CBRE said the Canadian tech sector grew by 7.6 per cent, or 91,300 jobs, last year compared with 2024.
Ottawa’s near-stagnant performance in three-year job growth continues its recent slide in the category.
According to CBRE’s 2025 Scoring Tech Talent report, Ottawa added 11,000 jobs between 2021 and 2024 for a gain of 13.2 per cent — a steep drop from the 31,000 new positions it said were added to the city’s tech payrolls in the five-year period between 2018 and 2023.
CBRE includes workers from more than 20 professions, including software developers, hardware engineers and systems and data managers, in its survey. It says the Ottawa tech industry employed about 98,100 people in 2025.
28th in average salary
Ottawa’s tech workers were 28th in CBRE’s salary rankings with average earnings of US$80,178 in 2025 — well behind runaway leader San Francisco’s mark of US$211,000. Ottawa had the second-highest annual salary of any Canadian market, behind Vancouver at US$87,000 and ahead of Toronto (US$79,798), Calgary (US$77,019) and Montreal (US$72,554).
There were some bright spots in the report for Ottawa.
According to CBRE, the region continues to have the highest concentration of tech talent relative to its overall workforce of any city in the top 50, with 12.4 per cent of all the capital’s workers employed in technology jobs last year.
That’s well above the 50-market average of 5.5 per cent and up slightly from Ottawa’s mark of 12 per cent in 2024. It’s also more than a full percentage point ahead of Toronto, which leapfrogged the Bay Area into second place on the tech talent concentration list at 11.3 per cent.
However, CBRE said Ottawa still lags many other cities when it comes to its share of tech workers with AI-specialty skills.
According to the survey, 4,622 LinkedIn members from Ottawa self-reported their occupation as “tech talent with artificial intelligence and machine-learning skills” last year — about 4.7 per cent of the city’s total tech workforce.
By comparison, 26 per cent of tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area and 20 per cent of Seattle’s tech employees said they had such skills.
“Job growth tied to AI will influence most commercial real estate sectors, from offices to data centers to multifamily,” John Morris, CBRE’s group president of advisory leasing in the U.S. and Canada, said in a release.
“Inevitably, some jobs will be eliminated over time as AI takes on more routine tasks. But CBRE’s view is that AI will change job composition more than it will overall job count.”
