Ottawa falls to 11th in CBRE’s tech talent rankings as job growth slows

September 9, 2025

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Ottawa dropped out of the top 10 in an annual ranking of North American tech markets as job growth in the nation’s capital fell behind other cities. The latest report from real estate firm CBRE 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. This year, the nation’s capital placed 11th in CBRE’s overall rankings, down one spot from last year. Ottawa finished fourth among Canadian cities after Toronto, which moved up one spot to No. 3, Waterloo Region – which was the biggest gainer, jumping to seventh place after ranking 18th last year – and Vancouver, which took 10th spot. The San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle held the top two spots, repeating their placings from a year ago. According to CBRE, Ottawa’s tech labour force grew 13.2 per cent from 2021 to 2024, adding about 11,000 jobs. That was well below the growth rate in the top two North American markets – Calgary, where the number of tech jobs rose by 61.1 per cent in the same period, and Waterloo Region, which saw its tech workforce swell by 58.2 per cent. It’s also a stark contrast to last year’s Scoring Tech Talent report, which saw Ottawa add more than 31,000 jobs between 2018 and 2023 for a growth rate of nearly 52 per cent – albeit over a five-year rather than three-year period. 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 95,900 people in 2024, up from 91,500 the previous year and 84,700 in 2021. (By comparison, Statistics Canada – which defines tech employment more narrowly around information and communication technology firms – said in its August labour market report about 65,400 local residents were employed in tech fields.) Continuing a recent trend, Ottawa was the cream of the crop when it came to having the highest concentration of tech talent relative to its overall workforce of any city in the top 50, with 12 per cent of all the capital’s workers in employed in tech – just ahead of the Bay Area’s mark of 11.4 per cent. However, Ottawa did not fare as well in CBRE’s assessment of workers with AI skills, based on the firm’s survey of LinkedIn members that self-reported their occupation as tech talent with artificial intelligence and machine-learning skills. CBRE said 3,400 workers in the nation’s capital – or just 3.5 per cent of the city’s total tech industry workforce – claim to have such skills, well below the Bay Area’s total of 76,000 and the 24,000 workers in Toronto who said they have AI training. The report said the number of computer and information systems managers surged 16 per cent in Canada last year due to the widespread adoption of AI, the biggest rise among all tech talent roles across North America. “Artificial intelligence is a transformative technology that is rapidly reshaping the employment landscape across the world, particularly in Canada, which has three of the top 10 largest AI talent pools in North America in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal,” CBRE Canada chairman Paul Morassutti said in a news release. “The ongoing deployment of AI systems across industries will continue to drive job growth and real estate demand.”