HQ relocations to Sun Belt persist

Companies are still moving their headquarters south, and the map is getting more lopsided. Commercial real estate firm CBRE says it has tracked 725 public headquarters relocation announcements since 2018, with activity rising again in 2025 after 561 announcements had been logged through 2024. (cbre.com, cbre.com) Texas is still the biggest magnet. CBRE says Dallas–Fort Worth has received more than 100 headquarters relocations since 2018, the most of any United States metro area, and added 11 more in 2025 from higher-cost metros including Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Chicago. (cbre.com) This is not just a Texas story anymore. CBRE says Charlotte, Miami, Nashville, and Phoenix are also climbing because companies are chasing lower taxes, pro-business policies, bigger labor pools, and newer infrastructure. (cbre.com) The industries moving most are the ones with expensive payrolls and sprawling operations. In CBRE’s earlier six-year cut of the data, technology led with 135 relocations and manufacturing followed with 120, which helps explain why Sun Belt markets with engineers, logistics hubs, and cheaper industrial land keep showing up on the short list. (cbre.com) The push factors on the other side are just as clear. CBRE found the biggest losses from 2018 to 2023 came from San Francisco and San Jose with 79 departures, Los Angeles and Irvine with 50, and New York City with 21. (cbre.com) Some of the marquee moves made the pattern hard to miss. Tesla formally relocated its corporate headquarters to Gigafactory Texas in Austin on December 1, 2021, Caterpillar said on June 14, 2022 that it would move its global headquarters to Irving, and Chevron announced on August 2, 2024 that it would move its headquarters from San Ramon to Houston. (ir.tesla.com, investors.caterpillar.com, chevron.com) What changed after the pandemic is that “move the headquarters” no longer always means “build a giant downtown tower in a new state.” CBRE says intrametro moves, where companies stay in the same metro area but shift to smaller and more flexible offices, are rising as hybrid work cuts the need for huge central offices. (cbre.com) That is why this trend shows up in office demand in a strange way. A city can “win” a headquarters and still get a smaller office than the old one, because companies are trading long rows of assigned desks for desk sharing, flexible floors, and collaboration space closer to where employees live. (cbre.com) Fortune 500 companies are moving more slowly, but they are moving in the same direction. CBRE found that from 2018 to 2023, Sun Belt states posted the biggest net gains in Fortune 500 headquarters, led by Texas at plus 10, Florida at plus 4, and Georgia at plus 3, while California posted a net loss of 8. (cbre.com) The result is a new kind of corporate migration map. Instead of one-way flights from coast to coast, the United States is getting a mix of interstate moves into Sun Belt metros and in-metro reshuffling into smaller offices, with Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, Charlotte, Miami, Nashville, and Phoenix taking a larger share of the headquarters economy each year. (cbre.com)