Ogden-Clearfield economy sparks leap in best-performing cities ranking

Photo supplied, Utah Department of Transportation
The east end of the 24th Street viaduct as it enters downtown Ogden is photographed Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2021.OGDEN — The Ogden-Clearfield metropolitan statistical area has once again netted a top spot on an international think tank’s 2025 list of best-performing cities, spotlighting its continued economic resolve and growth.
Each year, the Milken Institute updates its Best-Performing Cities (or BPC) index, which uses official data to assess the economic performance of large- and smaller-scale cities across the nation. On Tuesday, the organization released its latest report, which found the Ogden-Clearfield MSA ranked No. 2 overall among large cities.
Ogden just edged out No. 3 Salt Lake City, which also earned another “tier-one” designation. The Provo-Orem MSA rated as a tier-two large city, ranking 15th overall. St. George, meanwhile, was the second-ranked small city in the report, while Logan earned tier-two status with a No. 48 overall ranking.
Maggie Switek, senior director of the Milken Institute’s Research Department and one of the BPC report’s authors, told the Standard-Examiner that Utah metros are fertile ground for businesses.
“So, the way we examine the cost of doing business is by looking at the energy costs, the office rental costs, the labor costs, how expensive it is to hire workers and, of course, also the taxes within a state,” Switek said. “What we see is that the cost of doing business in Utah is pretty low, which has likely been one of the reasons why a lot of businesses have been moving to the area. That has really been powering the job growth in many of the cities such as Ogden. But, also, we’ve seen Salt Lake, Provo and other places across the state growing.”
The BPC report, which has incorporated new components in recent years to better reflect the current realities of society, is compiled using 13 metrics, each of which fall into one of three categories. Those categories are labor market performance, high-tech impact and access to economic opportunities.
Although there were a multitude of factors contributing to Ogden’s 24-spot year-over-year jump up the rankings, Switek says growth in jobs and wages, particularly in the manufacturing sector, played a significant role.
“The area, as we know, it has a very strong defense manufacturing — especially aerospace parts manufacturing — industry. But, also, there has been manufacturing in non-defense sectors related to sporting goods and auto parts,” she said. “All of that has been really fueling growth and has the potential to fuel growth in years to come. And that is actually coupled with pretty good performance on our metrics related to access to economic opportunity.”
Switek further highlighted the metro’s relatively egalitarian distribution of income.
“Ogden-Clearfield is the metropolitan area with the lowest income inequality among large cities across the United States,” she said. “So, all of these aspects, coupled with the job and wage growth, have really made it possible for Ogden-Clearfield to raise in the rankings.”
Meanwhile, the Ogden metro ranked second overall in community resilience, a measure of how well a community prepares for, endures and recovers from challenges, whether natural disasters or economic disruptions.
On the whole, Ogden fits the mold of cities that have enjoyed an upward trajectory.
“Cities such as Ogden-Clearfield and other mid-sized metropolitan areas that have more than 275,000 residents — so, they classify as large cities in our report — but have populations of less than one million … These cities have really been gaining in recent years, and that’s because a lot of them are located in states such as Utah or the Carolinas, which have pretty low costs of doing business and a high proportion of young population that has higher levels of education.”
Switek also added that, overall, the woes of the COVID-19 pandemic appear to be fading into the rearview where cities analyzed for the index are concerned.
“This year was actually the first year when I would say that the biggest gains and losses in the report were not driven by post-pandemic recovery,” she said. “In prior years, it was really the recovery of the leisure and hospitality sector that was driving the biggest gains and losses in the cities in our report. But, this year, we actually saw that the leisure and hospitality sector is pretty much stabilizing in the United States. It has recovered to about where it was before the pandemic. So, now, really, the growth is a more sustainable type of growth.”
For more information or to view the full BPC report, go to https://milkeninstitute.org/.