Employment gains in Oklahoma held firm in 2024
admin / March 2025
Job segments bifurcate, with industrial users seeing the largest pullback in hiring
Statewide employment growth throughout Oklahoma remained steady for most of 202
The pace of job growth in Oklahoma’s largest markets is slowing but maintaining its outperformance relative to the U.S. At the end of 2024, Oklahoma City reported job growth of 2.3%, while Tulsa reported growth of 2.4%. Both markets are seeing job growth run slightly hotter than pre-pandemic norms and continue to outpace the U.S. average of 1.3%.
The latest results show that while broader competition has softened, especially for office-using segments, Oklahoma City and Tulsa remain firm. The current pace of annual job growth is settling in with pre-pandemic averages, matching the average set from 2013 to 2019. The unemployment rate is hovering at 3.2%, up 40 basis points from last year’s time. The rise in unemployment reflects more people entering the labor force in search of work.
Tracing a similar theme among many markets, office-using employment has pulled overall hiring lower in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.
The latest annual results were led by leisure and hospitality and government, which added 12,300 and 8,800 new jobs, respectively. The path to recovery varies for these two segments. Initially hit hard, the leisure and hospitality segment is now about 9% above pre-pandemic levels. Even as Oklahoma’s center for government across federal and state levels, the public sector has yet to fully rebound and remains down about 1%.
The Oklahoma City employment base is now 4.7%, or 29,800 jobs, above levels in February 2020. The market’s rebound has been led by education and health services as well as leisure and hospitality, both of which added over 5,000 jobs over the last year. Locally, hits to the industrial space mostly mirror what has been seen throughout the rest of the space and nationally, with trade transportation and utilities seeing 1,300 fewer jobs over that same period.
From a statewide perspective, growth in these traditionally blue-collar industries has fallen by the wayside in the last year. Manufacturing was not immune to the sector’s broader macroeconomic pressures, seeing December end with 300 fewer jobs than the previous year. This trend will likely continue into the new year as companies like Canoo continue to shed jobs after declaring bankruptcy in February 2025.
That is not to say there isn’t a counterbalance of new interest in manufacturing space within Oklahoma. For instance, NorSun announced last year that it would construct a solar-wafer facility in Tulsa, aiming to enter production by 2026. New projects like this and existing companies expanding their footprints, such as Claremore Manufacturing in Sapulpa, can continue to create new jobs for Oklahomans within this segment. Still, current forecasts anticipate that 2025 will see a further pullback in tenant demand, culminating in higher vacancy rates.
The logistics sector fared far worse, seeing a reduction in workforce of around 4,100 employees across the state. Despite seeing the largest pullback of all employment segments, the impact on commercial real estate was nearly unrecognized as logistics space saw 3.4 million square feet of positive net absorption in 2024, an almost 80% increase from the preceding year. A large portion of this occurred in Oklahoma City, where Hobby Lobby moved into its 1.9 million square foot distribution system at the start of the year.
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