Only one-third of residents work in what the City’s Office of the Comptroller has called a “good job.” Here’s why that matters.
The numbers are so large that one can lose perspective: There are nearly 4.9 million jobs based in New York City, of which about 4.2 million are in the private sector. Yet in 2025, the city only added 33,400 new private-sector jobs — a rate of growth that amounts to 0.8%. While this rate is better than the national gain of 0.3% for the same period, it was driven entirely by a single sector: health care and social assistance. Further, through the first half of 2025, there were 4,600 fewer businesses than the previous year, accompanied by the lowest business formation for a quarter in five years.
This is a story that’s barely told, but it could shape the future of New York as much as any other. It’s imperative that we understand why the city’s job creation engine is sputtering and take decisive action to rev it up.
Anemic jobs growth and business contraction affect the City’s budget, restricting public service programs and funding for agencies through reduced tax revenues. It also makes it harder for current residents to find new jobs that allow them to afford living here, and prevents potential residents from finding gainful employment sufficient to move here. The subsequent population stagnation further restricts business formation, tax revenues and the City budget.
Look past the headline jobs numbers, and the story becomes even more worrisome. While New York City has long been known as the finance capital of the world, it has also been the home of a diverse collection of people and jobs in a wide range of sectors. Yet in recent years, job growth in the metro area has been concentrated in just a handful of industries: health care, social services, and leisure and hospitality.
Remove the health care and social assistance sector, and employment in the city is at its lowest level since mid-2022.
In fact, remove just the health care and social assistance sector from the picture, and New York City’s job growth in 2025 was actually negative. Nearly all new jobs in the region have been home health care aides, a role that tends to pay less and provide few benefits. An overreliance on such a narrow slice of work makes the city particularly vulnerable to economic shocks or pullbacks in these industries.
How serious is the problem, really, and what should we do about it?
The centrality of health jobs to the economy isn’t a new phenomenon. Nearly all job growth in New York City since the COVID-19 pandemic has been in the health sector. If you remove the 253,000 net new jobs added to the city’s care workforce between early 2020 and August 2025, as a whole, the city’s private sector lost jobs.
Analysis by the City’s Economic Development Corporation fleshes out the picture, showing that postpandemic job growth has concentrated almost entirely in low-wage jobs. This is in stark contrast to previous job growth, which was more balanced with mid- and high-wage jobs.
While there is an argument that any employment is better than unemployment, many of the positions that make up care economy jobs are not what the Office of the Comptroller itself classifies as “good jobs.”
In May 2025, then-City Comptroller Brad Lander released a report containing a rubric for judging the quality of a job based on four conditions: whether the job 1.) pays a living wage, 2.) offers full-time and year-round employment, 3.) provides employer-sponsored health insurance, and 4.) avoids physically demanding or hazardous conditions unless those conditions are offset by higher pay. The idea is that a job meeting these criteria is a “good job” in that it at least “meets a basic set of conditions for economic security and workplace standards.” Based on these criteria, only one-third of New York City residents have been working in good jobs over the past few years.
The comptroller’s report said this about the types of health care and social assistance jobs driving employment growth: “Despite employing hundreds of thousands of workers, these occupations offer minimal access to living wages, benefits, or year-round stability. Their persistently low performance underscores how many of the city’s essential workers remain trapped in low-quality employment.”
The sectors with the lowest share of good jobs, according to Lander? Personal care, food preparation and serving, and health care support. Two of those three are care-economy jobs, representing over 350,000 New York City workers today, with an average share of good jobs around 5%.
All this means that the majority of new jobs added since 2020, and a growing proportion of the city’s overall job base, are jobs of poor quality by the Comptroller’s Office standards.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that care work is not valuable work (in fact, it fulfills some of the most valuable needs for society), nor does it mean that the City should discourage job growth in these sectors. It simply means New York should think and act strategically to diversify job growth by nurturing and attracting employers that complement the growth in the care economy. At the same time, reforms should be pursued to make health care and social assistance jobs more desirable and financially rewarding.
How does job growth concentrating in care work affect the City’s finances?
On the surface, it’s apparent why job growth concentrating in low-paying sectors would be bad for the City’s budget. Less income for residents means less revenue from income taxes collected and less disposable income to be spent on consumption, which means less sales-tax revenue. In fact, personal income-tax revenue is forecast to be among the slowest-growing tax revenue sources for New York City over the next few years.
But the problem goes even deeper than that.
Not only are the industries where job growth has occurred in recent years the ones providing fewer benefits, but a large portion of these jobs also provide an income below the poverty line (just above $47,000 in 2023, by Robin Hood’s measure). The combination of few benefits and low pay means that the government itself must often step in to both provide workers’ health insurance and help cover the cost of living. Programs like CityFHEPS (the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement), which provide housing vouchers for eligible residents, cost the City upward of $1 billion in 2025 and are only growing.
The municipal budget gets constrained on both ends, with lower income-tax receipts from workers who earn less and higher safety-net expenditures for workers who can’t afford to live in the city without assistance.
While many of these low-income workers may receive their health insurance from Medicaid or through the Affordable Care Act, where the federal government covers part or all of the cost, the State and City chip in too. With the federal government abdicating safety-net funding in recent years, the financial burden for the City is likely to increase.
What can New York do to attract better and more diverse jobs?
Not all is doom and gloom for the city’s labor market. The metro area still holds several key advantages that can be utilized to attract more jobs. These include a world-leading financial system with plenty of capital ready to invest, world-class research universities, a top-tier creative and media industry ecosystem and an enormous, growing market for climate and transportation infrastructure. New York should establish new public initiatives to deploy these structural advantages in order to diversify and expand the jobs base.
These new initiatives could follow the example of the Economic Mobility Networks program launched by the City’s Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) in 2025. Worryingly, we are now four months into the Mamdani administration without a new head for NYCEDC being appointed by the mayor, nor a detailed jobs plan; appointing an effective leader here would help direct the city’s economic growth. Additional programs launched by City government, in partnership with both private and public organizations, should focus on the following areas:
Leading in tech and applied AI
The technology sector sits among the highest-income employment in New York City’s labor market, and the funding spigot has been on full blast. As NYCEDC’s State of the Economy 2025 report puts it, “New York City-based companies raised $67 billion in venture capital funding from 2022-2024 — 11.0% of nationwide funding. … The number of Tech establishments rose 15.8% from 2022 to 2024, during which time the number of establishments in the private sector grew by only 2.0%.”
A note of caution here: This tremendous capital growth in the city’s tech sector has not been matched by labor growth. Employment in tech has stagnated since the COVID-19 pandemic. The City needs to prioritize attracting and developing more of these high-paying, high-benefit, high-productivity jobs so that, as the sector’s capital funding grows, so does the opportunity for residents to work in tech.
One great example is AI Nexus, a partnership between NYCEDC and private companies to locate startup accelerators here and expand the region’s AI business ecosystem. New York should pull all its levers to attract employment in tech, from expanding university-industry partnerships like Cornell Tech to working with federal offices to build out targeted high-skill visa programs.
Growing the life-sciences sector
Just like the tech sector, life sciences has seen a huge boom in investment and new businesses but little accompanying job growth since 2022. NYCEDC and local universities have been investing in the sector through programs like The Science Park and Research Campus (SPARC) at Kips Bay.
SPARC is a full city block being converted into a life-sciences jobs and education campus combining CUNY colleges with private biotech towers. Backed by $1.6 billion in City and State funds and $2 billion in private investment, the project is expected to generate $42 billion in economic impact over 30 years. If things go as hoped, the public investment for this project will be returned by just over one year of the expected impact.
New York City must continue supporting its university research centers and advocate for funds from the State while seeking new sources to replace federal funding cuts. Assisting the development of new labs and research centers and incentivizing researchers to relocate to the city can accelerate workforce development here.
Building the green economy
Another potential opportunity is in climate technologies, a fast-growing sector that will provide significant investment and employment opportunities for years to come. Just as with the above sectors, the trend in climate tech has been a growth of funding while job growth has stagnated. Recent federal funding cuts and regulatory changes by the Trump administration also present significant headwinds for green technologies.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard project is one example in this space of combining new technology with climate-focused initiatives, such as Blue Highways, to transform land use and create new jobs. Blue Highways activates the waterfront for sustainable logistics and manufacturing, making New York City more resilient to supply-chain disruptions and tapping into the city’s origins as a port town. Rebuilding New York City’s shipping and manufacturing industries could create thousands of middle-income jobs in the trades while also providing clean energy and a resilient supply chain.
While tech, life sciences and climate technology represent a small share of New York’s GDP today, they are leaders in driving the city’s growth.
Ultimately, the City will have to pursue all these initiatives on a much grander scale to build a labor force with higher-quality jobs. The good news is that money poured into such job creation programs frequently returns multiple times the investment.
While pursuing these new types of work, the City should not disregard or discourage care-economy or tourist-economy job growth, or growth in any other sector with lower-wage jobs. The economy needs to be well-rounded, with a wide range of opportunities for people with different skill sets and backgrounds. But today, the balance is out of whack. To continue funding safety-net programs for lower-income New Yorkers and guard against economic shocks, it’s necessary to nurture more businesses and industries with a higher concentration of higher-income opportunities.
