The FT-Nikkei Investing in America 2025 ranking showcases the top US cities for international business. It compares 91 cities across 54 statistical indicators of importance to foreign investors.

The methodology used to create this year’s ranking is similar to that used in the 2023 edition, but some changes have been made. Indicators have been updated with the most recent data where available and a new ‘trade war resilience’ category has been introduced. Cities heavily reliant on imports or exports are considered more exposed to potential trade disruption.

When building the ranking, we need to weigh all of the factors that make a city attractive to foreign investors and combine them into a single score. As part of this balancing act, we have assigned the new ‘trade war resilience’ category 10 per cent of the final weighting.

Below is an outline of the categories that feed into the FT-Nikkei Investing in America ranking. We limited our selection to cities in 50 states and DC with a population above 250,000 based on 2024 Census place data.

Trade war resilience

This category looks at how resilient cities are to tariffs and trade wars. We considered two indicators of trade intensity: imports as a share of GDP at the state level, and exports as a share of GDP at the Metropolitan Statistical Area level. The lower these were, the more resilient to trade disruption the city was considered to be.

Sources: US Bureau of Economic Analysis, US Census

Workforce and talent

Talent continues to be the top priority for foreign investors. Our metrics remain unchanged from last year — we compared cities based on the size of their labour force, their share of college graduates, the number of universities nearby, the unemployment rate and the freedom of their labour market. Labour market freedom is modelled after the economic freedom index compiled by Canadian think-tank the Fraser Institute and research by Dean Stansel, a professor at Southern Methodist University who also worked on the Fraser Institute’s index.

Sources: Economic Policy Institute, FT Locations, Unionstats.com, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Census

Openness

This category, which looks at diversity, considers the size of a city’s foreign-born population and its racial diversity score — the chance that people of different races will be selected in any random sample of two. 

Source: US Census 

Business environment

This category looks at the cost and ease of doing business. Like last year, we considered a city’s taxes, incentives, rent, and utility costs, as well as how supportive local policies were towards FDI objectives. We also included the FEMA national risk index to capture the risk climate change poses to business operations.

Sources: Commercial Edge, FEMA, FT Locations, FT-Nikkei and Sido Survey, GIS Planning, Sales Tax Clearinghouse, Tax Foundation, US Census

Foreign business needs

Here we consider how much a city’s infrastructure and policies support international business. We scored cities by their number of international flights, distance to a major port, internet connectivity, and services to attract foreign investors.

This year we have also merged last year’s ‘aftercare’ metrics into this category. Aftercare refers to the level of state and local support available to foreign companies following their investment decisions, based on survey data.

Sources: BroadbandNow, FT-Nikkei and Sido survey, FT Locations, OAG

Quality of life

We considered the basics in this category: crime risk, school quality, commute time, and housing and healthcare costs. We also included variables that would make a city more entertaining and enjoyable to live in, including the density of dining, retail, leisure and cultural locations, as well as a city’s walkability. 

Sources: Applied Geographic Solutions, FT Locations, Niche, US Census, Zillow

Investment trends

This category looks at how much foreign and domestic investment a city attracted in 2024, as well as its annual GDP per capita. 

Sources: FT Locations and US Bureau of Economic Analysis