These are the cities where college graduates are actually landing jobs

Landing a job after graduating college can be daunting — knowing where to look for one can help.

Amid a volatile economy, a tough job market and a trend of AI eliminating some entry-level jobs, New York City and Chicago may not be the best places to job hunt. Smaller cities and their surrounding areas can serve as a great place to find a new gig, new research from payroll services company ADP suggests.

The job market in Raleigh, North Carolina’s metro area ranked at the top of the list in terms of annual wages, hiring rates, and affordability, the study found.

To rank each place, the study analyzed the annual wages of 140,000 people in their 20s, the cost of living in 55 U.S. metro areas with at least 1 million residents, and how often people in their 20s with a bachelors degree were hired within the last 12 months compared to the number of people employed in those jobs.

The metro areas of Raleigh, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Austin, and Birmingham, Alabama claimed the top five spots.

Raleigh, Baltimore and Austin, for example, are saturated with technology, health and financial firms, Ben Hanowell, ADP Research’s director of people analytics, told the Wall Street Journal.

Each of these five regions boast hiring rates of 2.8 percent or greater; Raleigh has a hiring rate of 4.2 percent, the highest of all locations analyzed.

The so-called Research Triangle has been providing an influx of new jobs at nearby universities.

“We’ve seen this stream of office projects over the last 18 months, and North Carolina State University and some of our private colleges are all supplying this great pipeline of workers,” Kyle Touchstone, director of Raleigh Economic Development, told the Journal.

Jordin Young, who graduated in 2024 from Bowdoin College, told the outlet that he took a job in Raleigh despite just knowing one person who lived there.

“I knew I wanted to explore a new city,” Young told the Journal, noting he appreciates the city’s social scene, affordability, and accessibility to parks.

The promising finds come as the nation’s unemployment rate lingers at 4.1 percent, but jobless rates for recent grads hovers at 7.3 percent.

“There’s a lot more great people than there are great jobs,” Susan De La Vega, a senior vice president at global consulting firm Korn Ferry, told the outlet.

The study also looked at locations that were affordable with robust hiring but offered lower wages. These included the metro areas of Tucson, Arizona, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Cleveland, Ohio.

Then there are the more expensive cities that offer high wages, but work is harder to find. Places around Boston, San Francisco and Newark, New Jersey offer high-paying jobs, but have low hiring rates.