Nashville, Other Mid-Sized Cities Offer Strongest Job Markets, Per Report

Big city life is just fine if that's your thing. But according to the Wall Street Journal, that's not the best way to find a job.

Instead, the best job markets are in America's middle-size cities -- from Nashville to Raleigh to Salt Lake City, to Jacksonville, Fla. and Austin, Texas.

Each has a population of less than 2.3 million.

And as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, they're all located in states with either low income tax, or none at all.

The WSJ worked with Moody's Analytics to assess 300 metro areas in search of the best job markets, taking into account five factors: "the unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, job growth, labor-force growth and wage growth in 2021."

Those rankings were then averaged for each location, as areas with more than one million residents being ranked separately from smaller ones.

As the WSJ noted, each of the top five cities are homes to large universities, such as Vanderbilt University in Nashville, or North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

"Larger cities remained at the bottom of the rankings this year. New York took 41st place, Chicago was 40th and Los Angeles was 26th," the WSJ wrote.