by | May 18, 2026
It’s a tough time for recent college graduates on the hunt for a job, and a recent study ranked Salt Lake City dead last for job prospects.
A new study from ADP Research, the research wing of the human resources management and software company, found that Salt Lake City ranked dead last among major metros for recent college graduates. ADP analyzed its payroll data between January 2025 to January 2026 for people aged 20-29, and it ranked 53 U.S. metro areas of over 1 million residents based on wages, hiring and cost of living.
Salt Lake City was ranked last in the most recent study, as well as last year’s study. The most recent report dinged the city in all three areas in which the study focused, and it found that the city “has weaker hiring than all but one metro, as well as below-median wages and affordability.”
Despite the state’s continued growth, increasing housing costs and narrowing job opportunities are serious issues the city and state will need to address, as those issues can have ripple effects into the future.
The ADP study may come as a surprise, considering the state’s continued projected growth and consistently strong economy. But for Phil Dean, chief economist and research director at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, the results of the study aren’t that jarring.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Dean said of the study, “because we definitely have, especially for younger people, a bit of a mismatch between where income levels are at and costs, especially housing costs.”
Dean said the state has seen slowing job growth across most economic sectors — which is also reflective of national trends. He said that employers are taking more of a “wait and see” approach that’s largely impacting the hiring of younger people. Weakened job prospects can contribute to young people renting for longer, which would delay them from buying a home and building up their personal equity.
“Those of us kind of further along, who have owned our house for a long time, maybe don’t fully appreciate how big that challenge is for younger people,” Dean said.
He pointed to the state’s most recent jobs report, which found that Utah’s year-over-year job totals increased by 0.6% (an increase of 10,400 jobs) between March 2025 and March 2026. He added that over the past 40 years, the state’s job year-over-year growth has averaged around 3%. The state’s unemployment rate held steady between February and March 2026 at 3.8%.
While those numbers may not be inspiring, the country’s overall unemployment is at 4.3% and the nationwide year-over-year job total only increased by 0.1%, according to the state jobs report.
“The state maintains a steady 3.8% unemployment rate, but the job market is tightening for job seekers, with fewer job openings per unemployed worker,” Ben Crabb, chief economist with the Utah Department of Workforce Services, said in the state’s March jobs report. “Total job creation is ahead of the national trend, but this expansion is mostly concentrated within a handful of industries.”
That report found that some sectors — like jobs in professional and business services, or in education and healthcare — saw notable gains over the past year. Meanwhile other industries saw job losses in the last year, most notably the leisure and hospitality industries, as well as jobs in the trade, transportation and utilities industries.
Construction jobs have remained a strong source of employment growth, though it has slowed. Dean said the job growth has been more on the technical side of building, saying “electricians, plumbers, framers, welders — there’s still job growth taking place there.” Dean said the state is forecasting slowed growth in most aspects — including population growth, GDP growth and job growth — but the state is still projected to grow nonetheless.
Looking east at the construction of Sugar Alley. Photo by Taylor Anderson
Jeff Grasso, founder and managing partner of Vesta Realty Partners, said local job types that have been lucrative for young people, like in financial services or in the tech sector, have been largely stagnant in terms of hiring.
He said lulls in hiring young, recent college graduates can have a ripple effect in the overall commercial real estate market, saying this hits on a number of issues across the board.
“If companies aren’t hiring, they don’t need office space,” Grasso told Building Salt Lake. “Job creation and household formation are diluted, and there’s less of a need for regional distribution of industrial (space), and that correlates to retail.”
He noted that Utah does have some benefits going for it, like the state’s above-average birth rate and continuing to be the youngest state in the country. But he added, “the in-migration aspect has extremely slowed down over the last three years here, kind of as interest rates started to go up.”
Typically, Utah’s consumer behavior tends to side toward home ownership, Grasso said, as the average consumer in the state wants to rent as cheaply as possible to then save toward buying a home. However, in-migration (people who move to Utah from other places) behavior is more neutral. Grasso said people who move to Utah typically are content with renting and paying a higher portion of their income toward housing.
He said the surge of in-migration and young migration led to more studio and one-bedroom apartment buildings going up, but the slowing growth could likely mean builders will have to adapt and change course on future plans.
“Developers need to think about more sustainable units, maybe bringing in two, three, four bedrooms and allowing a rental price point for families to differentiate products,” Grasso said.
He said larger units have been more resilient than studios and one-bedrooms, as those smaller units are still seeing heavy concessions to try and draw in new tenants. Grasso said it’s still possible to find apartments offering two or three months in free rent, as the area is still slowly absorbing the glut of new apartment units on the market.
“I think people are bargain hunting, and they’re not thinking they’re going to live in that unit for three, four or five years,” Grasso told BSL. “They’re thinking about what’s cheapest for my pocketbook this year, and if they have to move again next year, that’s probably what they’re doing.”
But with those concessions and the still-sluggish multifamily market comes cheaper rent for young people. While that’s a plus for renters, especially in Downtown Salt Lake City, Dean said the state still needs to focus on creating ways to make housing more affordable for young people. Dean worries that young people in Utah could be left behind and forced to leave the state due to increasing costs outpacing wages.
“We probably need more smaller houses than we need the mansions being built to be able to accommodate those that are trying to get in the house for the first time, and wages are the other side of that,” Dean said. “If we’re going to keep our kids and our grandkids here, changing how we do housing in the state is a big part of that.”
Email Jacob Scholl
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Site built by John Battenfeld
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Leave a Reply