For the last five years, Waterloo has been able to claim the title “#1 small tech talent market in North America” thanks to a high ranking in the annual CBRE Scoring Tech Talent report. In 2025, the accolades went into overdrive as Waterloo Region leapt up the rankings – an incredible 11 positions – to land at #7 overall.
The report, which CBRE releases annually, is a comprehensive analysis of labour market conditions, cost and quality for highly skilled tech workers in North America. The top-50 markets in the United States and Canada were ranked according to their competitive advantages and appeal to both employers and employees.
Punching (way) above our weight
At #7 overall, Waterloo is ranked higher than Boston, Raleigh-Durham, Atlanta and Denver, which are all much larger communities with exceptional tech credentials. The Waterloo community was easily the fastest-riser in the ranking, jumping 11 spots. Raleigh-Durham was next, improving by 4 spots on the overall ranking.
Waterloo Region is still the #1 small tech talent market in North America, too. For context, the next highest ranked small tech talent market was Pittsburgh, which was at #31 in the overall ranking.
The new report puts the Waterloo ecosystem at #2 overall for tech talent concentration, at 11.7%, and in second position for tech talent growth rate at an astounding 58.2% growth from 2021-2024.
Waterloo is also uniquely positioned as a magnet for younger tech talent, with the fastest-growing populations among people in their 20s and 30s among all communities captured in the CBRE report.
A powerful Corridor
The Toronto-Waterloo Corridor now accounts for two communities in the top-7, including Toronto, which moved up one spot to claim #3 in the ranking.
Toronto’s tech talent workforce grew by 14.7% from 2021-2024, and it can claim the fourth-highest concentration of tech talent in North America.
Together, Toronto and Waterloo continue to constitute the third-largest tech cluster in North America, after the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.
What makes Waterloo so special?
The Waterloo community tech story starts with the University of Waterloo. It’s one of the top-15 tech schools in North America, with the largest computer science enrollment among the top-25 tech schools.
UWaterloo has more students enrolled in computer science than any of Cornell University, UC Berkeley, NYU, Columbia University or Stanford, and more than MIT and Harvard combined.
As our new Tech Talent Calculator highlights, this talent comes at a competitive cost, too, thanks in large part to favourable exchange rates and much lower payroll taxes and benefits costs. CBRE estimates that a 500-employee office in the Waterloo region would cost less than half as much as an equivalent office in San Francisco.
These reasons, and more, are why companies like Google, EPAM Systems, SAP and Oracle NetSuite have chosen to grow in Waterloo, and why homegrown companies like Faire, OpenText and Arctic Wolf thrive here.
There’s much more to the Waterloo tech story. Want to learn more? Reach out to the Waterloo EDC team today.