This Is America’s Largest City Economy

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 25, 8:30AM EDT

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This Is America’s Largest City Economy — © Eloi_Omella / iStock via Getty Images

Some cities have economies that are larger than those of small countries. Chicago’s gross domestic product is bigger than South Africa’s. The Los Angeles GDP is larger than that of Turkey. The populations of these cities are much smaller than the countries we have compared them to here. That means the level of productivity in these metros is substantial.

To identify the biggest American city economy in 2020, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed and ranked real GDP for 2020 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) for 383 U.S. metro areas with data. GDP is the total value of goods and services produced in an area.

Data on GDP growth from 2001 to 2020, the largest industry in 2020 and the industry with the largest GDP growth over that time also came from the BEA. Population figures and median household income are five-year estimates for 2019 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Drilling down the list of the largest metro-area economies, the order becomes less intuitive. For example, though Silicon Valley (centered around San Jose, California) has an enormous tech-based economy, it ranks 12th largest by GDP, smaller than the metro-area economies of Atlanta, Houston and Dallas, all of which have much larger populations.
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The top 25 largest U.S. metropolitan-area economies are home to 135.1 million people, or 42% of the U.S. population. They contribute $9.3 trillion, or nearly 51%, to the country’s real gross domestic product.

The largest city economy is the New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA metropolitan statistical area. Here are the details:

Real GDP in 2020: $1.50 trillion
GDP growth, 2001 to 2020: $303.87 billion, or 25.4% (173rd smallest)
Largest industry GDP in 2020: Finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing ($449.09 billion)
Industry with the largest growth, 2001 to 2020: Information (+185.74%)
Median household income in 2019: $78,773 (25th highest)
Population in 2019: 19,294,236 (the largest)

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Click here to see all of America’s biggest city economies.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.