Texas is the country’s fourth-best state for business in 2026, according to a widely watched ranking from CNBC — a position that actually represents a slight downgrade for the famously pro-business Lone Star State. Last year, Texas ranked second overall, behind only North Carolina.
In this year’s ranking, published by CNBC on Thursday, Texas scored first in the cable channel’s workforce category, which it measured factors like worker training programs, economic output per job and states’ ability to attract talent. Texas also scored second in the economy category, which measured recent GDP growth and job growth, and third in technology and innovation, which considered factors like new patents per capita and research and development grants.
Texas also scored highly in the ranking’s cost of doing business and infrastructure categories. This year — as energy and utility concerns continue to play a larger role across the country — CNBC actually weighted infrastructure as its most important category, accounting for around 18% of the total score.
“It’s become an economic imperative,” Stuart Lacey, the founder of the AI firm Labyrnth, which provided data for the study, told the outlet.
But Texas scored nearly last — 49th, ahead of only Tennessee — in CNBC’s quality of life measurement, which looked at factors such as crime rates, healthcare and environmental quality.
And in business friendliness — a category that would seemingly be made for Texas, where tracking corporate relocations has become a local pastime and politicians love to use phrases like “economic linchpin” — Texas actually scored a middling 23rd, behind even high-tax Connecticut, Vermont and Minnesota.
To come up with scores for that category CNBC measured factors including states’ regulatory frameworks, liability climates and overall levels of bureaucracy. It also measured states’ friendliness toward emerging industries such as artificial intelligence, digital assets and cryptocurrency — a metric where Texas, which for years has been passing crypto-friendly legislation and cranking out new data centers, would seem to shine.
“Blockchain is a booming industry that Texas needs to be involved in,” Gov. Greg Abbott wrote on social media in 2021, after signing one crypto legislative roadmap bill. “Texas will be the crypto leader,” he promised soon after.
In this year’s ranking, Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia — another state where data centers are booming — took the top three spots, and Minnesota rounded out the top five. The lowest-ranking states were Hawaii, Alaska, Rhode Island, Louisiana and West Virginia.