For one week in July, Augusta, Georgia beat every other American city on a list that measures where careers are actually accelerating. Its housing market, for now, is still pricing the city like nobody noticed.
LinkedIn named Augusta the No. 1 “City on the Rise” in its second annual ranking, released in late July, topping a 25-city list that also included Richmond, Reno, North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota and Harrisburg in the top five. The ranking draws on LinkedIn’s own labor market data, tracking year-over-year change in hiring, job postings and net talent migration into each metro. LinkedIn credited Augusta’s position primarily to its cybersecurity and defense sector, anchored by the Army’s Fort Eisenhower (formerly Fort Gordon) and the state-backed Georgia Cyber Center, alongside a growing medtech industry and expanding data center investment.
“You look at the growth that’s at Fort Gordon…and now the growth of Savannah River Site,” Eric Toler, executive director of the Georgia Cyber Center, told local station WJBF. “As industry expands with data centers that are interested in moving here, there’s just a big boom in technology. Therefore, we’re attracting more students, better students, and they’re staying here for their jobs after they graduate.”…