Meet the New Metroplex

Is Austin-San Antonio the next Texas megaregion? These experts think so.

The San Antonio-Austin megaregion extends from the edge of DFW to the Mexican border, according to a new study.

If commuting patterns are a reliable indication, the San Antonio-Austin area qualifies as a “megaregion.” That’s among the conclusions of a new study designed to illustrate so-called megaregions in the U.S. based on commuter traffic.

The study, by researchers Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae, employed data from the U.S. Census Bureau — representing more than 4 million commute-to-work paths — to pinpoint megaregions across the country. They labeled one of those megaregions as San Antonio-Austin.

According to Nelson and Rae, megaregions, which are anchored by major metropolitan hubs, are valuable instruments for explaining the country’s “economic geography.” However, geographically defining megaregions has historically “turned out to be rather tricky,” National Geographic says.

“The emergence in the United States of large-scale ‘megaregions’ centered on major metropolitan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography,” Nelson and Rae reported in research journal PLOS ONE.

In their study, Nelson and Rae used a visualization method and an algorithmic tool to map out U.S. megaregions linked by workers’ commuting patterns. In Texas, they say those megaregions are Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, El Paso, Rio Grande Valley, West Texas, Amarillo-Lubbock, and San Antonio-Austin.

On their megaregion map, Nelson and Rae show San Antonio-Austin extending from the edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth megaregion to the Mexican border. It is sandwiched east-west between the West Texas and Houston megaregions. The map doesn’t indicate which counties or communities, aside from the two main cities, are in the San Antonio-Austin megaregion. However, it’s probably a stretch for the San Antonio-Austin megaregion to cover as much territory as the researchers indicate it does.

In a certain sense, San Antonio-Austin already is a megaregion, but it’s not at the level of a more tightly bound megaregion like Dallas-Fort Worth. In fact, some experts predict San Antonio-Austin won’t transform into a true megaregion until 2025, and other experts don’t think San Antonio-Austin ever will be on the same scale as DFW.

To be sure, though, the officially separate San Antonio and Austin metro areas continue to grow toward each other, with San Antonio suburb New Braunfels and Austin suburb San Marcos at the epicenter of this north-south collision. One projection shows the San Antonio-Austin region, connected by the I-35 corridor, will be home to more than 5.7 million people in 2030, up from nearly 4.3 million in 2014.

The researchers behind the study don’t think their work is the final word on San Antonio-Austin or any other megaregion they outlined.

“We believe the megaregions we identify are a true reflection of the economic geography of the United States,” Rae says in a news release, “but of course they need to be tested and validated in the real world for them to have real use.”

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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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