By Staff Reporter
BUFFALO — For the second month in a row, Buffalo Niagara added jobs in September. Step back to a full year, though, and Western New York’s private employers have slightly fewer workers than they did last fall. A new benchmark report from the region’s main business group helps explain why the gains keep disappearing.
A good month, a flat year
The state Labor Department’s September report, released Oct. 15, showed New York’s private sector adding 6,700 jobs statewide. In the Buffalo Niagara metro area, employers added 900 jobs in September for the second straight month, The Buffalo News reported. That was the fastest increase since last December.
The 12-month numbers tell a different story. In the department’s five-county Western New York region (Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie and Niagara), private-sector jobs fell by 600, or 0.1%, to 538,700 in the year ending in September.
Where the jobs came and went over the year:
- Gains: private education and health services, up 900; professional and business services, up 900
- Losses: financial activities, down 800; trade, transportation and utilities, down 500; manufacturing, down 400; mining, logging and construction, down 400
- Government: down 200
“We’re not up. We’re not down. We’re just kind of kind of floating there, bobbing, bobbing, bobbing in the ocean,” Timothy Glass, the Labor Department’s regional economist in Buffalo, told The News.
The spring layoff announcements didn’t turn into a wave of job losses. First-time unemployment claims have been running at a slow pace since August, about where they were a year ago, The News reported. But employers aren’t hiring aggressively either. The metro area is still about 7,500 jobs short of where it was before the pandemic. The nation recovered all of its lost jobs by February 2022 and has grown more than 5% since.
“We have more headwinds now than we’ve had in the last couple of years,” said Julie Anna Golebiewski, an economist at Canisius University. She pointed to rising interest rates and higher prices squeezing both businesses and consumers.
The only peer region with fewer businesses than in 2020
The Buffalo Niagara Partnership’s new Prosperity Report compares the region with 12 metros it competes with: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, Memphis, Milwaukee, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Providence, Richmond and Salt Lake City.
The region’s 8.3% job growth from 2020 to 2025 ranked eighth of the 13. The rankings that should worry policymakers are about wages and new businesses:
- Business establishments: down 1.6% since 2020. Buffalo Niagara was the only one of the 13 to decline.
- Business applications: 9.2 per 1,000 residents, last among the 13 and less than half the rate in Salt Lake City.
- Average wage: $67,551 in 2025, 10th. Average wages fell 2.4% from 2020 to 2025 while U.S. wages grew 2.7%.
- Median household income: $72,300, ahead of only Memphis.
- Housing: 2.7 new units permitted per 1,000 existing homes in 2025, last among the 13, while home values rose 32%.
“Population growth has remained limited; business formation trails many peer regions; and too many residents are not fully participating in the region’s economic progress,” said Grant Loomis, the Partnership’s president and CEO. “While employment and economic output have expanded in recent years, those gains have not consistently translated into stronger wage growth, higher household incomes, or broadly shared prosperity.”
Strengths that aren’t sticking
The region does lead in some areas. It ranked first among the 13 in college degree completions per resident and first in the share of adults ages 25 to 64 with associate degrees. Semiconductor jobs grew 141% from 2020, the most in the peer group. Food and beverage manufacturing and advanced manufacturing also ranked near the top.
The trouble is keeping people. The region ranked second worst in net domestic migration, both overall and for people with at least a bachelor’s degree. It was 10th in labor force participation for adults ages 25 to 64. International migration to the region fell 55% from 2024 to 2025, which had a “notably negative impact locally,” The News reported.
“We are really succeeding at producing talent, but largely failing at converting that talent into long-term workforce and population growth,” Mr. Loomis said.
He put a number on what better workforce participation would mean. “Even a modest gain in workforce participation would have a huge economic impact,” he said. “Improving just two percentage points in this area would translate into approximately 10,000 more workers across the region.”
Getting to work is part of the problem. Buffalo Niagara has the shortest average commute in the group, 21.5 minutes. But one in 10 households has no vehicle, the worst share among the 13. “A short commute does not tell us whether a particular worker can reach a particular shift reliably,” Mr. Loomis said.
What comes next
The Partnership calls the report step one. Over the next several months, employers and regional partners are supposed to choose a small set of priorities, set measurable goals and name a lead organization for each.
That gives the region a scoreboard. It also leaves open questions for state and local economic development agencies, which spend public money on incentives every year. Will future tax breaks and grants be tied to the measures where Buffalo Niagara ranks last, like business formation, wages and housing supply? And will anyone report publicly on whether those numbers move?
The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the Partnership which priorities it expects to propose first, and the Labor Department for the metro area’s month-by-month figures behind its September estimate.
Featured image: Downtown Buffalo and Sahlen Field. Photo by Quintin Soloviev via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, cropped.
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