Houston Tops For RNs

Good news for health professionals: Houston ranked as the nation's best city for registered nurses

A new report has ranked Houston as the best U.S. city for registered nurses, where those professionals average the highest average salary in the country at $78,000 annually.

If you're a registered nurse living in Houston, then you've chosen the best city for your profession, according to a new report.

Austin-based blog Sparefoot recently released a list of the 10 best U.S. cities for registered nurses, and given Houston's strong ties to the medical industry, it's no surprise that the city came out on top.

To assess which cities were the best, the site teamed up with Indeed, the world's largest job site by users, to find the 10 metro areas with the most job listings for registered nurses, as well as the average salaries for those positions in each city. Sparefoot also aggregated the median rent and home prices based on 2013 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. The site ranked each metro area by combining the rankings — they gave twice as much weight to job availability — to determine overall rankings.

The report found that Houston ranked first in every category, leading Sparefoot to say that the city is "hands-down the best metro area for registered nurses." The Houston metro made up the largest share of nursing jobs among the Top 10 at 14.6 percent. The city offers the highest average salary for registered nurses ($78,000), as well as a low median home price ($141,400) and median annual rent ($10,728).

All in all, four Texas cities were ranked on the list and all were included within the top 7. Dallas came in at No. 3 — right behind Tulsa at No. 2 — with registered nurses making an average salary of $71,000 and a median home price of $150,000. Additionally, San Antonio was ranked at No. 5 with an average salary of $62,000 and a median home price of $131,100, and Austin ranked No. 7 with an average salary of $65,000 and a median home price of $192,000.

The rest of the list included Seattle (No. 4), Los Angeles (No. 6), Baltimore (No. 8), Phoenix (No. 9) and San Diego (No. 10).

lists rankings

Jobs report

Texas clocks in as No. 7 best state to find a job, new report says

Photo by The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash

It's easier to find a job in Texas than in nearly any other state.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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