Calgary Climbs to 15th in North America: What CBRE's 2026 Scoring Tech Talent Report Tells Us About Our Ecosystem

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CBRE has released its Scoring Tech Talent 2026: AI Realignment Underway report, and the data confirms what Calgary's tech community has felt building for a few years now: this city is one of the fastest-growing tech talent markets on the continent. What makes that growth especially notable is scale — Calgary is achieving this pace of talent expansion with a population significantly smaller than Toronto's, signaling a tech and innovation ecosystem that is punching above its weight and maturing faster than its size would suggest. 

Each year, CBRE ranks the top tech talent markets across North America using 13 weighted metrics covering workforce depth, job growth, education supply, labor costs, and more. Calgary's 2026 results are its strongest yet — and they're worth unpacking for anyone building, hiring, or investing in this ecosystem.

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Calgary's Scorecard & Overall Ranking

Calgary moved up to 15th overall among the top 50 North American tech talent markets, continuing a multi-year climb: 17th in 2025, and 20th in 2024.

The city is now classified as a "Large Tech Talent Market" - a tier reserved for markets with more than 50,000 tech workers — with a total tech workforce of 80,500.

Tech talent now makes up 9.4% of Calgary's total employment, well above the 50-market average of 5.5%. In other words, tech isn't a side story in Calgary's economy anymore — it's becoming central to it.

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Key Takeaways & Market Highlights

A few numbers stand out from this year's report:

• #1 in North American job growth. Calgary led all 50 top markets in tech job growth rate, expanding by 56.0% - 28,900 net new jobs between 2022 and 2025.
• The #2 net job creator in North America, trailing only Toronto. Tech jobs added (28,900) massively outpaced local tech degree graduates (3,660) over the same period, leaving a net job-minus-degree surplus of +25,240. That gap is a strong signal for anyone in the ecosystem: Calgary needs talent, and it needs it now.
• A demographic magnet for young professionals. Between 2019 and 2024, Calgary saw its population of residents in their 20s grow by 21.9%, and residents in their 30s grow by 20.3%. The city now ranks 3rd in North America for the highest concentration of residents in their 30s (17.3% of the total population).
• A growing AI talent base. Calgary is home to 4,609 AI-skilled tech workers, a foundation that positions the city well as AI capability becomes a bigger factor in where companies choose to grow.

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The Bigger Trend: Fastest Workforce Growth in Calgary's History

Zooming out, the trajectory is the real story. Calgary's tech workforce grew from 51,600 workers in 2022 to 80,500 in 2025 — the fastest volume acceleration in the market's history, and the underlying driver behind the city's jump up the rankings three years running.

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Why This Matters for Calgary's Tech Community

For founders and future builders, this is more validation that Calgary is a serious place to build: real hiring markets, real job creation, and a market that's still relatively affordable compared to established gateway cities. For talent, it's a sign that the opportunity is real - a labor market adding jobs far faster than local grads can fill them means real demand for experienced and early-career talent alike.

For the ecosystem builders, investors, and partners who've been putting in the work to grow this community: the numbers are starting to reflect it.

A report like this shows us how far Calgary has come. What carries that forward is the ecosystem itself, the people and programs connecting employers with talent, week after week. That's the kind of collective effort behind Tech Talent Tuesdays, a collaboration between Calgary Economic Development, Careers in Technology and Innovation, Platform Calgary, and the Government of Alberta's Labour Market Development Agreement, alongside companies across Calgary's tech and innovation ecosystem. The bi-weekly gathering acts as connective tissue between employers and talent, and what's learned there feeds directly into an annual Workforce Insights Report for the ecosystem — the same kind of data this post is built on.

This fall, that work continues with sessions on AI adoption, workforce competitiveness, and AI return on investment.

Read the full report from CBRE here: Scoring Tech Talent 2026 →

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Research and quotes were drawn from industry sources including Platform Calgary publications, and The CBRE Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report. These sources highlight the critical role of the ecosystem and focused engagement in driving success.

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