America's Top Boomtowns -- Where the Jobs Are

If you're looking to start your career or are thinking about getting a new job, consider looking for work in a boomtown. You'll need to be geographically flexible, of course, but if you are, you can take advantage of the better employment odds in a boomtown -- a growing town that's thriving economically.

The folks at SmartAsset.com recently released their list of the 10 top boomtowns of the past year. Here's a look at them, and how you might land a job in one of them.

Tampa Florida skyline at dusk, with water in front of it
Tampa Florida skyline at dusk, with water in front of it

Image source: Getty Images.

What makes a boomtown?

When SmartAsset.com set out to find the boomiest of boomtowns, it evaluated 581 cities in America, assessing five key metrics:

  • The unemployment rate

  • How the unemployment rate changed over the previous year

  • The housing growth rate

  • The population growth rate

  • Gross domestic product (GDP) growth

Why those five metrics matter is clear: You want a low unemployment rate so that it's more of a job-hunter's market than a job-filler's one. It's also better for the unemployment rate to be falling than rising.

An increasing number of homes will help keep housing more affordable, and a growing population tends to reflect people moving into an area. (Note that the population growth rate assessed here is a net one, subtracting those who left an area from those who came to it.) Finally, GDP measures the value of goods and services produced in the region, so GDP growth reflects increasing productivity -- a promising sign for job seekers.

America's top 10 boomtowns

Without further ado, here are SmartAsset.com's 10 top boomtowns of 2017:

Rank

City

Net Migration Rate

Housing
Growth Rate

Unemployment Rate

1

Cape Coral, Florida

2.9%

7.1%

3.5%

2

Largo, Florida

1.9%

7%

3.1%

3

Palm Coast, Florida

2.4%

7.1%

3.9%

4

Franklin, Tennessee

1.4%

7.9%

2.1%

5

St. Petersburg, Florida

1.9%

4.3%

3.1%

6

Spring Hill, Florida

1.9%

4.5%

4.3%

7

Riverview, Florida

1.9%

4%

3.2%

8

Town 'n' Country, Florida

1.9%

3.5%

3.2%

9

Round Rock, Texas

2%

5.2%

3%

10

Tampa, Florida

1.9%

3.4%

3.2%

Source: SmartAsset.com.

I didn't include each city's 2016-2017 change in unemployment or its GDP growth. Unemployment fell over the year in all 10 towns and GDP growth was close to 4.2% for most, with Cape Coral posting the strongest growth, at 5.2%, and Franklin posting the slowest growth, at a still-respectable rate of 3.4%.

You'll notice that eight of the towns are in Florida, with Franklin, Tennessee, and Round Rock, Texas, filling out the rest of the list. Central Florida -- around Tampa and Orlando -- has been seeing much growth. Orlando, for example, has been attracting more technology businesses, while vacation-related businesses have been expanding and getting updated. The Orlando Sentinel notes: "From its early roots in the aviation, aerospace and defense industry along the Interstate 4 corridor, Orlando has grown new tech clusters like modeling and simulation, digital media, interactive entertainment, microelectronics, life sciences, and health-care and medical technologies."