Business Weather
Where business momentum is moving across 25 US metro economies. Each market is scored against its own history, so 50 means normal for that place and not average for the country.
Equal tiles, positioned roughly. This is a schematic rather than a projection: distances are wrong and only rough adjacency is kept, because twenty-five metros on a true map is twenty dots overlapping on two coasts. A dashed edge marks a market whose signals are thin or disagree.
Tested against what happened next, this describes conditions now and does not predict them. It is published as a description, not a forecast. Across 749 historical metro-months, the hottest markets went on to grow employment 2.36% over the next year while the coldest grew 4.54%. Heat is where activity is, not where it is going. The full method and the tests it failed.
The board
Temperature is how unusual this market is against its own past. Momentum is how far that has moved in 3 months. They routinely disagree, and the disagreement is the useful part.
| Market | Temp | Weather | Momentum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raleigh | 91 | hot | ▬ -0.8 |
| Philadelphia | 83 | hot | ▼ -7.2 |
| Atlanta | 81 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -13.5 |
| New York | 77 | warm | ▼ -4.7 |
| San Jose | 75 | warm | ▲ +7.8 |
| Charlotte | 74 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -12.2 |
| San Diego | 72 | warm | ▬ -1.7 |
| Tampa | 71 | warm | ▲ +4.9 |
| Dallas | 70 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -13.5 |
| Seattle | 68 | warm | ▲ +4.4 |
| Nashville | 68 | warm | ▬ -2.2 |
| Houston | 67 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -10.3 |
| Minneapolis | 65 | warm | ▲ +7.0 |
| Denver | 62 | warm | ▬ -2.3 |
| Phoenix | 62 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -11.6 |
| Chicago | 61 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -10.1 |
| Boston | 61 | stable | ▲▲ +17.4 |
| Salt Lake City | 59 | stable | ▬ -1.9 |
| Austin | 59 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -8.7 |
| Los Angeles | 57 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -14.6 |
| Detroit | 57 | stable | ▬ +2.9 |
| Washington DC | 55 | stable | ▲▲ +9.7 |
| Portland | 38 | stable | ▬ +1.0 |
| Miami | 34 | cooling fast | ▼▼ -18.0 |
| San Francisco | 34 | cool | ▬ -2.1 |
Built from
Employment 40%, Unemployment 25%, Building permits 20%, Labour force 15%. 100 public series, refreshed on the Observatory’s cycle.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (employment, unemployment, labour force) and U.S. Census Bureau (building permits), via Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). Retrieved August 25, 2026. Analysis by DFX Intelligence.