Texas Executive Hiring: A 2026 Market Report

I oversee our technology practice from San Francisco. So when I tell you that Texas has, in real terms, become a credible destination for senior US tech and finance talent, you ought to recognize I’m saying that against my own short-term commercial interest. Every senior placement we make in Austin or Dallas is, mechanically, one we didn’t make in San Francisco or New York. But the numbers are indifferent to about commercial interest, and the evidence is clear-cut: Texas absorbed more senior US talent in 2025 than any state outside California, and the direction looks set to continue.

This analysis draws from 61 senior placements we made in Texas between January 2025 and the first week of April 2026, across our Austin office at 701 Brazos Street, Suite 1600 and our Dallas operations. Of those 64, the breakdown was 36 in Austin, 17 in Dallas-Fort Worth, and 8 in Houston. Each remuneration package detailed below comes from a verified, executed offer document for a professional who has since assumed the role in Texas.

What follows is not the romantic version of Texas migration you may have read in 2021. That version — everyone was leaving California, the tech industry was moving wholesale, Austin would replace Silicon Valley — was predominantly aspirational. The true story is more nuanced and, from our perspective, more interesting. Texas didn’t replace anything. It built something new alongside the existing US tech and finance hubs, and that new thing has now matured enough to contend on its own terms.

The 2025 numbers, in one chart

Three numbers that frame the rest of this piece.

The 14.2% year-over-year growth in Texas senior-hire postings outpaces every other major US state. For reference, New York grew 4.1% over the same period, California grew 2.8%, and Florida grew 9.6%. Texas is, by this measure, the single fastest-growing senior labor market in the United States.

The candidate-side number is at least as important. In 2022, approximately 30% of the senior candidates in our active searches said they would consider a Texas-based role. By late 2025, that number was 52%. For candidates with school-age children or in dual-career households where both spouses work, the openness rate is even higher — we have encountered candidates in 2025 who proactively asked us to focus their search on Texas opportunities in particular, which would were unusual three years ago.

This didn’t happen overnight

The prevailing account that Texas "exploded" in 2020–2021 because of COVID is incomplete and partly wrong. The seeds were planted earlier, and the present trajectory has roots that go back to 2017 or earlier.

The 2017 federal tax reform mattered. The cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions, set at $10,000, increased the effective after-tax cost of living in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, and California. For a senior professional earning $1M+, the cap meant losing $50K to $80K of previously-deductible taxes — a considerable change to disposable income. By 2018–2019, a handful of senior US financial-services and tech executives had already establishing Florida or Texas residency for tax purposes, even while still working primarily in New York or San Francisco.

COVID accelerated what was underway. With remote work proven feasible at scale, the inquiry of where to physically live became disentangled from where to professionally work. Texas had warm weather, advanced cultural infrastructure (museums, restaurants, schools, multiple Tier-1 universities), proximity to other Southern hubs, and zero state income tax. The relocation thesis went from a tax optimization story to a quality-of-life story.

Specific corporate decisions catalyzed the next wave. Tesla’s 2021 headquarters relocation from Palo Alto to Austin, Oracle’s 2020 move from Redwood Shores to Austin, Apple’s ongoing campus expansion in Austin, Toyota’s long-established North American HQ in Plano, and Charles Schwab’s relocation from San Francisco to Westlake (Dallas-Fort Worth) generated a base of senior leadership demand that hadn’t existed at scale before. Each of these moves seeded a network of executives who then began recruiting their former colleagues.

The capital allocation followed the executives. By 2023, major venture-capital firms had opened Austin offices: Founders Fund, a16z, Greylock, and several others. The corporate development teams of major acquirers (Salesforce, Microsoft, Cisco) began holding regular Austin-based meetings. The Austin Convention Center became a default venue for senior tech industry events that, three years prior, might have happened in San Francisco. Capital, once dispersed across geographies, found a considerable Texas concentration.

Austin: the technology pivot

Austin is the heart of the story. 36 of our 61 2025 Texas placements were in the Austin metropolitan area — up from 26 in 2024 and from just 11 in 2022. The composition has evolved decisively toward technology and tech-adjacent roles, even as the city has retained its broader sector diversity.

The most conspicuous sub-trend in this dataset, in my view: hardware-adjacent roles are growing faster in Austin than pure software. The confluence of Tesla’s gigafactory, Samsung’s Austin fabrication facility, Applied Materials, NXP Semiconductors, and a deepening semiconductor ecosystem has generated demand for hardware engineering leadership that simply didn’t exist in Austin five years ago. We completed placements for 6 senior hardware leaders in 2025 — in 2020, that number was zero. The CHIPS Act and the wider US semiconductor reshoring effort have completed Austin one of the two or three most active US hardware-engineering hiring markets, alongside Phoenix (Intel/TSMC) and the Bay Area (still the largest by volume).

The software/SaaS sector remains the largest pool of Austin placements at 14 of our 38. The composition has changed though. A few years back, Austin software placements were predominantly mid-market SaaS companies serving B2B customers nationally. Today, they include a considerable share of late-stage private companies with valuations in the $1B+ range, a fact that would were unusual in 2020. The maturation of the Austin VC ecosystem — with Founders Fund, Greylock, and a16z all running active Austin operations — has supported larger funding rounds for Austin-headquartered companies, which in turn has supported senior remuneration that competes (within 20%) with Bay Area equivalents.

A particular case worth recounting: in 2025 we ran a VPE search for an Austin-headquartered AI infrastructure company at the Series C stage. The total comp package signed was $1.2 million — 14% below what we estimated the equivalent Bay Area company might have paid for the same candidate, but with no state income tax, dramatically lower housing costs, and a candidate who expressly preferred Austin over San Francisco for family reasons. The negotiation was straightforward; the candidate moved from Mountain View; the company has since grown its Austin engineering team from 35 to 75 people. The story is, based on our observations, increasingly typical.

Dallas: the financial-services magnet

Dallas-Fort Worth is a different story than Austin. The Texas financial-services capital has long hosted major banks (Comerica, Texas Capital), insurance headquarters (Liberty Mutual, McKesson, USAA via San Antonio nearby), and asset managers, but the 2020–2024 wave of Wall Street relocations has materially shifted the equation. The most visible move was Goldman Sachs’ massive new campus under construction in Uptown Dallas, scheduled to house 5,000 employees by 2027. The Goldman campus is symbolic but understates the breadth of the relocation wave: Charles Schwab, Toyota Financial Services, Bank of America’s growing campus, and a handful of hedge funds and asset managers have all materially scaled DFW operations.

Of our 17 DFW placements in 2025, 14 were in financial services or financial services-adjacent roles. The remaining 4 spanned healthcare, industrials, and consumer. The financial-services concentration is unusually high for any single US metropolitan area outside New York — and the median CFO total comp in Dallas of $785,000 (across the 9 DFW CFO placements we made in 2025) mirrors this concentration.

To put that number in context: Dallas CFO remuneration is considerably below New York’s $985K median (which we address in detail in our New York CFO remuneration report) — but above what the same role might have paid in DFW five years ago. The narrowing of the geography premium for senior finance talent is one of the more impactful pricing developments of the past 5 years.

The other interesting structural feature of DFW: back-office concentration creates senior demand. Many of the financial-services firms with DFW operations have located their technology infrastructure, operations, and shared-services functions there, while keeping client-facing and trading functions in New York. This means there is concentrated demand for senior Operations, Technology, and Internal-Audit leadership in DFW — roles that would historically were in New York or Chicago. We completed placements for 5 senior Operations and Technology leaders at financial services firms in DFW in 2025; in 2022, that number was 1.

Houston: energy meets technology

Our smallest Texas dataset in 2025 (8 placements) and the most stable. Houston remains primarily an energy and healthcare market, with limited but growing exposure to technology. Median remuneration for senior energy-sector roles in Houston tracks within 5% of national medians for equivalent roles — meaning Houston pays competitively for senior energy talent without the geography premium that NYC and SF carry. The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, continues to drive senior healthcare administration and clinical-leadership demand.

The change in Houston is more subtle than the change in Austin or Dallas: energy companies are increasingly looking for executives with technology backgrounds. Three of our 8 Houston placements in 2025 were technology executives moving into traditional energy companies focused on digitization, AI-enabled operations, and energy-trading analytics. This is a considerable shift for a city where executive résumés were historically dominated by upstream oil-and-gas operating experience. The candidates we completed placements for were generally from California or the Northeast, with backgrounds in industrial SaaS, data analytics platforms, or enterprise infrastructure — not traditional energy career paths.

A conspicuous candidate pattern worth observing: Houston relocations in our 2025 dataset outsizedly involved candidates with family ties to Texas (grew up there, family still there) or with dual-career households where the spouse’s career was based in Texas. The "blank slate relocation" candidates — senior professionals choosing Houston based purely on professional opportunity — are still rare. The city is contending primarily within an existing network, not attracting net-new senior talent the way Austin is.

Remuneration comparison: TX vs. the coasts

The most useful framing for candidates evaluating Texas opportunities is a direct comparison of the same role profile across major US markets. We’ve assembled the 2025 numbers from our active practice across all nine office cities.

For VP Engineering at a $1B–$5B SaaS company, 2025 median total remuneration by market:

The Texas-vs-SF remuneration gap is real and material on a gross basis. The Austin VPE makes approximately 71% of what the San Francisco VPE makes for the same job. That’s a considerable number, and most published benchmarks stop there. But the gross gap is only the start of the true calculation.

Two factors reverse the landscape quickly when you do the net math. First, the Texas markets have zero state income tax, while California has the highest top marginal rate in the country at 13.3%. Second, housing in Austin and Dallas is dramatically less expensive than San Francisco housing — particularly for the family-size homes that senior executives generally buy. The confluence means the net disposable income for the Austin VPE is closer to the San Francisco VPE’s net than the gross numbers suggest.

For broader context on how senior remuneration varies across US markets and sectors, see our 2026 Executive Remuneration Report, which puts the geographic story in context with sector dynamics.

The expense-of-living math

Headline remuneration numbers obscure the true disposable-income calculation, and the disposable-income calculation is where the Texas pitch actually wins (or loses). The pertinent math for a senior US professional considering an Austin move from San Francisco:

Two critical points to notice. First, in the home-ownership scenario, the Austin VPE comes out $64,000 per year ahead of the San Francisco VPE in disposable income terms — despite earning $240,000 less in gross remuneration. The calculus flips entirely because the expense of housing in San Francisco is so high that it consumes the gross remuneration advantage. Second, in the renting scenario, San Francisco still wins, but by less than people expect — only $36,000 per year, and that gap shrinks further when commuting time, longer working hours, and other quality-of-life factors are considered.

The owning-scenario flip is the foremost important fact about the Austin-vs-SF math for most senior executives. Senior executives in their 40s and 50s generally own rather than rent. The Austin advantage in disposable income is considerable precisely for the demographic most likely to be considering a senior US relocation.

For dual-income households the calculus becomes even more favorable to Texas. Both spouses’ incomes avoid state income tax in Texas. Housing costs are paid once but disposable income is earned twice. A dual-VPE household in Austin nets out significantly ahead of the same household in San Francisco, even though gross remuneration is lower.

Who is actually moving

The account of "Texas migration" obscures the fact that the true migration is highly demographic-specific. Three tendencies from our 2025 Texas relocation placements (where we tracked the candidate’s prior location):

Family-stage executives are over-represented. Of our 45 interstate relocations to Texas in 2025, 32 candidates had school-age children. The school-age cohort over-indexes on Texas relocations because the housing-cost differential is especially powerful when buying a home large enough for a family with multiple children, and because the public-school options in suburban Austin (Westlake, Eanes, Lake Travis) and DFW (Plano, Frisco, Highland Park) are nationally contested at price points San Francisco and New York cannot match.

Dual-career households are over-represented. 28 of the 45 relocations involved dual-career households where both spouses had professional careers. The Texas tax advantage applies to both incomes, and the depth of the Austin and Dallas job markets is now sufficient to support both spouses’ careers in a way it wasn’t five years ago. We have placed several candidates where the move was contingent on the spouse also finding a role — in 2022, this was a deal-breaker for most Texas opportunities; in 2025, it’s almost always achievable.

Late-career executives are growing as a segment. A segment that didn’t exist in our 2021 data has surfaced: senior executives in their late 50s or 60s relocating to Texas for what may be their final 5- to 10-year career chapter. The dynamics: lower cost of living means lower required remuneration, the role is often advisory or operating-partner work rather than CEO/CFO, and the late-career executive is in a position to optimize for quality-of-life rather than maximum remuneration. We completed placements for 6 senior executives in this profile in 2025. None in 2022.

The growing talent-pool problem

The counterpoint of demand outpacing supply: Texas is now short on senior talent for the most in-demand roles. The relocation wave that helped employers in 2021–2023 is mostly complete; the easy candidates have already moved. For the most contested roles — AI engineering leadership, FinTech CFOs, biotech R&D — we’re increasingly running multi-state searches because the local Texas talent pool is authentically thin.

This is producing a secondary effect: signing bonuses for cross-state relocations are growing. Our 2025 Texas placements that involved out-of-state relocation had median sign-on bonuses of $185,000, compared to $90,000 for placements where the candidate was already Texas-based. Companies are willing to pay for the inconvenience because the supply isn’t there. Multiple Austin technology companies we worked with in 2025 expressly built sign-on bonus budgets of $238K+ into senior offers for out-of-state candidates as a contested necessity.

A related dynamic: cross-Texas rivalry for senior talent is intensifying. A few years back, Austin and Dallas operated in functionally separate labor markets — an Austin tech executive rarely considered Dallas opportunities, and a Dallas finance executive rarely considered Austin. In 2025, we completed placements for 4 Austin-based candidates in Dallas roles and 3 Dallas-based candidates in Austin roles. The state of Texas is becoming a more integrated senior labor market than it was, which is good for candidates with mobility but adds complexity to companies trying to retain senior people.

Specialization within Texas

Texas is too large to think of as a single market. The pertinent question for a senior US professional considering Texas is which sub-market within Texas matches their professional and personal needs. A high-level mapping based on our 2025 placement data:

If you’re in software or SaaS leadership: Austin is the strongest market. The VC ecosystem, the late-stage private company concentration, and the depth of senior tech executive networks all favor Austin. Specific neighborhoods worth being aware of: Westlake (executive residential), Domain (corporate campuses), East Austin (younger startups), South Congress (creative tech).

If you’re in financial services or asset management: Dallas-Fort Worth is the only serious option. The Goldman, Schwab, BoA, and Toyota Financial Services concentration produces a financial-services peer network that doesn’t exist elsewhere in Texas. Specific neighborhoods: Highland Park and University Park for residential, Uptown and Downtown Dallas for corporate offices.

If you’re in energy or healthcare: Houston, by default. The energy supermajors and the Texas Medical Center create unique professional infrastructure that Austin and Dallas cannot match.

If you’re in hardware or semiconductor: Austin remains strongest because of the Samsung, Applied Materials, Tesla, and NXP concentration. But Dallas-Fort Worth has emerging strength in specific sub-segments (telecom, defense electronics).

If you’re in FinTech or LatAm-focused finance: Austin and Dallas are both options, with Austin slightly preferred for FinTech-startup roles and Dallas preferred for traditional financial services adopting FinTech approaches.

What happens next

Three developments we anticipate to continue through 2026 and into 2027, based on the searches we’re currently running and the conversations we’re having with both candidates and clients.

The Austin tech market will persist maturing. Faster maturation than most observers expect — we’re seeing executive teams at Austin-headquartered companies that resemble Bay Area teams in scope and seniority, with the same remuneration expectations relative to local cost of living. The companies that benefited most from Austin’s lower-cost talent base in 2020–2021 are now paying remuneration that competes within 15-20% of Bay Area equivalents. The "Austin discount" is shrinking.

Dallas will evolve into a credible rival for NYC financial-services talent. The Goldman campus opening in 2027 is expected to be a catalyst. We anticipate 12–17 months after that opening to see considerable churn from NYC financial-services senior roles to Dallas, particularly for back-office, technology, and operations leadership. The front-office trading and M&A advisory functions will remain New York-anchored for the near-to-medium term, but the wider financial-services labor market will persist rebalancing toward Dallas.

Houston will begin drawing technology-native executives in larger numbers. The energy industry’s digital transformation is generating roles that previously didn’t exist there, and Houston’s cost of living relative to Austin makes it attractive for executives looking for a Texas base without Austin’s tech-bubble pricing. This is a secondary trend in our findings but accelerating.

Practical guidance if you’re considering Texas

Three specific suggestions based on what we have observed work and not work across the preceding four years of Texas placements.

Start with the calculus before the account. Use realistic numbers for your specific situation: your actual gross remuneration, your actual housing situation, your actual tax bracket, your actual family configuration. Generic "Texas saves you money" narratives are wrong in specific cases. We have collaborated with candidates for whom Texas was a worse financial outcome than staying in NYC because of specific tax situations or unique housing needs. Run the calculus before you run the search.

Don’t assume "Texas" means "Austin." The three major Texas markets are functionally different. The wrong choice between Austin, Dallas, and Houston can leave you with a professional network mismatch that takes years to recover from. We have encountered candidates accept Austin roles thinking they’d find Dallas-equivalent finance opportunities later, only to discover that the Austin finance market is too thin to support that pivot.

Network before you move. The senior US technology and finance communities in Texas are real but younger than their coastal equivalents. Building professional relationships before relocation makes the move significantly smoother. We regularly connect candidates considering Texas with our 2025 placements who’ve recently made the move — the candor of those conversations is more useful than any reading we can provide.

For candidates currently evaluating Texas opportunities or considering whether a Texas-based search makes sense for their situation, I’m happy to discuss specifics confidentially. marcus.ellison@emersonsearch.com. The conversation is private, complimentary, and productive whether or not you’re actively in market.

Methodology & caveats

This analysis is derived from 61 verified, finalized and countersigned offer documents from Texas senior-level placements made by Emerson Search between January 2025 and the first week of April 2026. We exclude offers that were extended but rejected, withdrawn, or never finalized.

"Texas" includes all three major metropolitan areas: Austin (36 placements), Dallas-Fort Worth (17 placements), and Houston (8 placements). We exclude smaller Texas metros (San Antonio, El Paso, Corpus Christi) where our 2025 placement volume was too small to be statistically considerable.

All remuneration figures are gross (pre-tax), in nominal US dollars. Cost-of-living and disposable-income calculations use representative current-year housing costs from Zillow and Redfin for the specific metropolitan area; federal tax calculations use 2025 brackets and 2025 standard deduction. State tax calculations use 2025 state-specific rates and brackets. The illustrative comparison in the expense-of-living section assumes married-filing-jointly status with two dependents.

This report does not constitute financial planning, tax, or relocation advice. Individual outcomes vary based on personal tax circumstances, family configuration, and specific real-estate decisions. Consult a tax advisor and financial planner before making relocation decisions based on this analysis.

This piece is authored by Marcus Ellison, Managing Partner of Emerson Search, with data assembly and review by our Austin office team and the wider Emerson Search research function. Marcus co-founded Emerson Search in 2021 and leads our technology practice from our San Francisco office. Direct contact: marcus.ellison@emersonsearch.com. For our broader US remuneration analysis, see the 2026 Executive Remuneration Report. For coverage of a parallel migration story in Florida, see our piece on Miami’s rise as a US finance hub.