{"id":412595,"date":"2026-01-17T08:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T08:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/412595\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T08:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T08:55:09","slug":"what-will-the-2026-economy-look-like-deseret-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/412595\/","title":{"rendered":"What will the 2026 economy look like? \u2013 Deseret News"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Annual Economic Report to the Governor found Utah among the nation’s top economies in 2025The state saw solid, but moderating growth across most metrics last year.While fiscal projections for 2026 are mostly positive, housing affordability is a critical, ongoing issue<\/p>\n

Utah\u2019s economy continued to outpace most of the rest of the country in 2025 in spite of persistent inflation, a weakening jobs sector and a growing separation between high-income households and the rest of the country.<\/p>\n

In its annual Economic Report to the Governor<\/a>, presented Friday at a Utah Chamber event in Salt Lake City, the University of Utah\u2019s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute identified plenty of data points illustrating the state\u2019s mostly enviable fiscal performance over the year past.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s 3.3% unemployment rate, 1.5% job growth and 3.2% wage growth last year reflected a \u201cdurable\u201d economy, according to the report, though those rates also reveal a path of moderation when compared to Utah\u2019s performance metrics over the last few years.<\/p>\n

Utah\u2019s biggest economic concern\"\"Phil Dean, chief economist co-chair for Utah Economic Council, speaks at the 2026 Utah Economic Outlook & Public Policy Summit at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News <\/p>\n

During comments to the 700 or so Grand America attendees on Friday morning, Gardner Institute chief economist Phil Dean pointed to one area that remains a point of concern for Utah leaders.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s a warning sign,\u201d Dean said. \u201cWe\u2019re in a danger zone here I think. We\u2019re now at the lowest home ownership rate in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dean noted that while Utah median home prices placed the state somewhere in the 7th to 10th most expensive housing market in the country in 2025, median wage rankings for the state fell well below that mark.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is both an economic imperative and a moral imperative,\u201d Dean said, to find a way to build housing that allows the children and grandchildren of Utah residents to start their own households in the state.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Dean shared a graph during his talk that showed how Utah has been tracking when it comes to the median multiple, a ratio that compares median household income with the median home price. <\/p>\n

On that scale, Utah has been performing progressively worse over the last decade, dropping from \u201cmoderately unaffordable\u201d in the years 2014-2017 to \u201cseriously unaffordable\u201d in 2018-2020 to its current status, since 2021, of \u201cseverely unaffordable.\u201d<\/p>\n

What will 2026 bring on the economic front?\"\"Economist Natalie Gochnour speaks during the 2026 Utah Economic Outlook & Public Policy Summit at the Grand America in Salt Lake City on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News <\/p>\n

The Gardner report notes the Utah Economic Council is predicting on a national level that 2026 will see GDP growth of around 2%, inflation hovering near the 3% mark and unemployment a little over 4.5%.<\/p>\n

The council\u2019s 2026 Utah forecast projects:<\/p>\n

Continued moderate job growth supporting real wage gainsUtah\u2019s population to grow more rapidly than the rest of the U.S. but more slowly than in the state\u2019s pastModerate growth of taxable sales (a useful measure of goods consumption)Further increase to the state\u2019s median home price albeit at a slower pace with housing supply constraints continuing to weigh on new first-time homebuyers as well as influencing labor markets and impairing other consumption<\/p>\n

The report highlighted stock market gains in 2025, driven mostly by high-flying artificial intelligence efforts that saw hundreds of billions of dollars in investment last year. Those rising valuations occurred even as most of the AI-focused efforts have yet to produce revenues commensurate with the level of investment, raising concerns about a potential AI investment bubble. <\/p>\n

And while stock market gains helped build wealth for the highest earning Americans, middle and lower income households worked to keep pace with the rising cost of basic necessities in 2025.<\/p>\n

Utah\u2019s take on the AI juggernaut\"\"Gov. Spencer Cox speaks while at the 2026 Utah Economic Outlook & Public Policy Summit at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News <\/p>\n

During his comments at Friday\u2019s economic summit, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox noted that fast-developing AI software is akin to most other new innovations in that the tools \u201ccan be a positive and a negative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cox also highlighted the state\u2019s efforts to oversee how AI-powered services are deployed, including the newly launched Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. He also pointed out how AI\u2019s disruptive qualities, unlike many previous innovations, was a bigger threat to white-collar professions than working class jobs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to be thoughtful about this,\u201d Cox said. \u201cWe can\u2019t protect every job … that\u2019s just not going to be the case. What we are going to do is to make sure AI is human-centered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s event also included a preview of 2026 legislative priorities from Utah lawmakers and a fireside chat with Cox, Gardner Institute director Natalie Gochnour and former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Annual Economic Report to the Governor found Utah among the nation’s top economies in 2025The state saw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101,5817,8793],"class_list":["post-412595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-news-division","tag-news-feed-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}