CNBC ranking - Virginia is #3 and our competition couldn't be happier.
Metallica - Enter Sandman Live
Virginia’s Competitors Should Be Thrilled We Believe Our Own Press Release
If you run economic development for North Carolina, Florida, or Tennessee, CNBC’s #3 ranking for Virginia is good news.
Not just because their methodology is wrong (who knows? It changes every year), but because of what it does to us - it keeps us complacent and less willing to make the necessary changes in order to be competitive.
In 2023, Bloomberg ran a story about how in just two years 2.2 million people moved to the South.
Click here:
It’s a long, informative article but for all the words, I found one missing:
Virginia.
There was no CNBC ranking in 2020 due to COVID but this is Virginia’s record since:
2021 - #1
2022 - #3 (cue gasp)
2023 - #2
2024 - #1
2025 - #4 (passes out)
2026 - #3
According to the Bloomberg article in 2021 and 2022, over 2,200,000 people move to the American South with $100,000,000,000.00 in tow.
Virginia was largely driven through or flown over.
To be fair to our beloved Commonwealth, Virginia has seen net international migration of over 40,000 in 2025 alone. This is largely due to growth in the tech sector - which many are now attacking - but it basically nets us out to minimal population growth. Another caveat - the incomes associated with that influx are also higher than the ones leaving.
Let’s be honest - last year North Carolina added Net Domestic Migration by over 85,000 and Tennessee added over 42,000.
So, yeah - their economic development departments must be loving our CNBC rankings, self-loving press releases, and myopic op-eds.
It gives Virginia a reason to stop looking at the one thing that actually predicts where business goes next: where people and money are already moving.
Every quarter Virginia spends celebrating #3 instead of reading its own migration data is a quarter competitors get to keep winning that argument uncontested.
Psychologists call the underlying failure Belief Perseverance: a belief survives contradiction even after the evidence behind it is gone.
Virginia’s version is worse than the textbook case, because the contradicting evidence didn’t arrive after the #3 and get explained away — it was published first.
The Virginia Manufacturers Association ranked the state #9 in manufacturing competitiveness, down from #7, in January 2026.
Chief Executive’s CEO survey put Virginia at #10 in April. Both existed months before CNBC’s July 9 ranking.
Virginia FREE’s own migration analysis, released July 13 using Census and IRS data, put Virginia at #36. Not top ten. Thirty-six.
Virginia’s #3 belief wasn’t left unrevised by later data — it was built on top of contradiction that already existed.
The wealth math underneath is its own warning.
Virginians who left the state in 2023 averaged $89,994 in income, versus $82,947 for those arriving — a gap that’s held every year since 2005. Florida is the single biggest destination for that departing wealth, at $118,662 a year on average.
Migration is the fastest, least-spinnable signal in economic development — it shows in near real time whether a state’s pitch is actually working.
Virginia’s #3 says the pitch is landing.
The migration data says otherwise, and has for years. A state that keeps citing the flattering composite while ignoring the revealed-preference data responds slowly to its own competitive erosion — exactly the condition a rival economic developer wants a target state to stay in.
Meanwhile, Virginia is adding cost at the precise moment resiliency should be the priority.
This year’s General Assembly passed several bills that will be adding to the Cost of Doing Business including a brand new paid family and medical leave program.
CNBC ranked Virginia #26 on Cost of Doing Business BEFORE that passed and they also rated us as #11 on Business Friendliness.
We added direct and compliance costs right as Virginia needs to be its most competitive — and they will not show up in a composite ranking until well after employers have already felt them.
That cost is landing on a state with less room to absorb it than the #3 headline suggests.
The federal government — Virginia’s largest single customer — is carrying $39.5 trillion in debt, headed past $40 trillion this fall, and Virginia’s own CNBC economy score already slipped from #14 to #23 this year on federal workforce and budget cuts.
Blame the president all you want - it’s legit - but it should underscore a flashing red light warning of an unsustainable reliance on federal government spending.
The 2013 sequestration cuts hit no state harder, concentrated in the same Northern Virginia region now leading the state in domestic-migration losses.
And the data center tax exemption fight this spring — a months-long standoff over whether Virginia would unilaterally alter a signed incentive agreement — did reputational damage with site selectors that no ranking has caught up to yet, win or lose.
So, what’s the Call to Action?
First off - this is not a knock on either party or any governor as I have been warning about CNBC’s rankings for close to a decade.
This is a call to stop pretending #3 means Virginia can absorb new cost, federal exposure, and reputational uncertainty without a plan that is honest about the real challenges we face. That plan must be flexible to match the velocity of change occurring globally.
Real resiliency looks like this: read migration and CEO-survey data as the operating scorecard, not the composite.
Model the compliance cost of this year’s new mandates against the states actually winning the migration numbers.
Build a federal-dependence diversification plan now, while there’s runway, not after the next sequestration.
And stop letting a beat-the-press-release number set the pace of a response that market behavior has already been demanding for years.
Our competitors are counting on Virginia not doing any of that.
The only real question is how long we intend to prove them right.
Yeah, the CNBC #3 ranking matters - but in which direction?
Better sleep with one eye open, folks.
Best version - h/t Hokies!