The Best City for Outdoor Jobs

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 3, 9:30AM EDT

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When people think of work in America, likely they think of jobs in offices, or, now, jobs where people work from home. America’s largest companies include Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway. Few of the people who work at these corporations spend time outside, unless it is a lunchtime walk for exercise. However, millions of people work outdoors in construction, farming and making deliveries. Some places are better than others when it comes to these jobs, and at least one study looks at them by city.

Obviously, location and climate have a large impact on the desirability of outdoor jobs. 24/7 Tempo has picked the best city for outdoor jobs using a ranking formulated by LawnStarter, a lawn-care startup that frequently researches city and state amenities. LawnStarter compared the 200 most populous cities across 26 metrics, including air quality, average temperature, temperature extremes, precipitation, outdoor job opportunities, cost of living, transit access and rate of work-related injuries.

Metropolitan areas in Arizona, Texas and Washington dominated the list. Safety was one component we looked at. High wages for people who work outdoors was another. Public transportation was taken into account as well.

Cities in the sweltering Deep South and the far north tended to have lower scores due to their extreme temperatures, while many cities in California scored low in the air quality and natural hazards metrics.
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Frisco, Texas, was the best city to work outdoors. Here are the specifics:

Outdoor job opportunities per 100,000 residents: 1297.0 (ninth highest)
Work-related severe injuries per 100,000 workers: 25.5
Average yearly total of very hot days: 103
Average yearly total of very cold days: 31

Click here to read to see all the best cities for outdoor jobs.
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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.