Monster just released the list of best cities for young professionals. Cincinnati didn’t make the list, but five other Ohio cities did. Columbus ranked #7 on Monster’s new list of the best U.S. cities to build a career. Cincinnati ranked #26.
Cincinnati has more workers and a bigger economy than Columbus. A Huntington Bank analysis released in March found Cincinnati now employs 1.16 million people, compared with Columbus’s 1.15 million, and produces $198 billion in GDP versus Columbus’s $182 billion.
I teach early-career professionals in the Cincinnati metro, so when I saw that gap between the economic data and Monster's report, I wanted to know what actually explains it. I will cover the list of Ohio cities, the index, and what it means for Cincinnati. I will end this post with a limitation of this measure.
Ohio Tops the List
Five Ohio metros made the top 10, more than any other state:
Akron at #2
Dayton at #3
Cleveland at #5
Toledo at #6
Columbus at #7
Cincinnati, the state’s largest economy, isn’t on that list. Here’s why.
Monster’s Build-a-Career Score
Monster’s Build-a-Career Score is a simple average of two equally weighted measures: a Career Opportunity Score, which measures job postings relative to the size of the local labor force. It is normalized from 0 to 100 across all 100 metros in the study. The other measure is a Rental Affordability Score. It uses May 2026 Zillow rent data and is also normalized from 0 to 100, where cheaper rent scores higher.
Cincinnati’s numbers:
Career Opportunity Score: 64.0
Rental Affordability Score: 82.1
Build-a-Career Score: 73.0, which is (64.0 + 82.1) ÷ 2
On Affordability and Opportunity
A Rental Affordability Score of 82.1 puts Cincinnati in line with Columbus’s 84.2 and well ahead of pricier top-15 cities like Charleston (64.1). For Cincinnati, Career Opportunity is the problem. A 64.0 is dead last among Ohio’s six largest metros, behind Dayton (78.3), Columbus (77.1), Cleveland (75.4), and even Toledo (68.8).
Here’s how much the Career Opportunity Score costs Cincinnati. Swap in Columbus’s Career Opportunity Score of 77.1 and Cincinnati’s Build-a-Career Score jumps to roughly 80.6, statistically identical to Columbus’s actual 80.6.
So what does that variable actually measure? It doesn’t measure how many jobs exist in Cincinnati. It measures how many job postings are open right now, relative to how many people are in that city’s labor force. A labor force of over a million needs a proportionally larger number of active postings just to post the same ratio as a metro a third its size. Dayton doesn’t need many new openings to move its score, but Cincinnati does.
More on this data limitation below.
Cincinnati’s Changing Landscape
It gets worse when you look at how Cincinnati’s labor market is changing. Cincinnati’s two most recognizable headquartered employers shrank their labor force in the second half of 2025. P&G announced up to 7,000 non-manufacturing job cuts in June 2025, about 15% of that workforce, phased in over two years. The company employs roughly 10,000 people in Cincinnati and, at the time of the announcement, hadn’t said how many of those cuts are local. Two months later, Kroger announced nearly 1,000 corporate layoffs, about 200 of them in downtown Cincinnati, alongside 60 store closures over the following 18 months.
Young Professionals and Economic Development
Thriving cities across the U.S. have something in common: they have large populations of young professionals, or they actively recruit them. This is where the Cincinnati metro is struggling and needs to do better.
On a recent visit to Chicago, I couldn’t help but notice how much downtown activity catered to young professionals, whether it was stereotypical young-professional bars or running clubs and riverfront walks. I didn’t investigate rental rates, but I’d guess Chicago has a range of rental unit types and price points to accommodate different pay levels. It also has public transportation infrastructure that lets people commute into the city without owning a car, allowing young professionals to take advantage of cheaper rent outside of the city center. Eliminating car expenses also saves young professionals a lot of money; with good public transportation, they can avoid gas, insurance, parking, and maintenance.
Moreover, Chicago firms target universities to recruit interns from across the Midwest. They strategically attract young professionals and early-career employees. Spend a summer walking around the Loop, and you can’t help but notice all the college interns visiting. Young professionals eventually become midcareer employees, then upper management and C-suite leaders.
This is where Cincinnati struggles. It doesn’t cater to young professionals; it assumes they’ll be here by default. Policies, activities, and entertainment dollars target midcareer and older professionals. Economic development efforts focus on attracting large firms and their C-suites. That makes sense: those firms bring high salaries and a large tax base. But that recruitment strategy is expensive, and it has to be maintained indefinitely to keep working.
A young professional population brings spending dollars, energy, the arts, and most importantly, innovation. That’s what’s missing in the Cincinnati metro, including Covington and Newport across the river: a targeted approach to recruit and retain young professionals.
If Cincinnati wants to become a thriving economic power, it needs a real strategy for making itself attractive to younger professionals. I want my students to choose Cincinnati not because it’s home, but because it’s exciting and the opportunities to grow here are abundant. We need to improve the value proposition for why they should pick Cincinnati.
If you’re early in your career and recently chose between a big legacy employer and a smaller, growing one, hit reply and tell me which one you picked and how it’s going so far. I want to hear it.
Thank you for sharing this post with your community. Informed consumers and employees improve market outcomes for all.
Limitations
Like any other data, the methodology matters. There is a lot to pick on with this data, but I will focus mainly on Career Opportunity Score.
Job postings- The press release does not make it clear how job postings were measured. The data source matters; the number of postings may vary by season and geography. Finally, in the economic development industry, job postings do not always approximate job openings. Relying on job postings as a measure of job opportunity will bias the data downward, especially in areas where large firms might be hiring multiple positions using the same job posting.
Monster also states that its Career Opportunity Score “does not measure wages, job quality, or individual career outcomes.” Therefore, treating every job posting equally may not be the best way to measure career opportunities.
Sources cited
Monster.com. (2026, August 3). Best Cities to Start a Career in 2026: Top 100 U.S. Metros.
Huntington Bank regional economic analysis, reported via Yahoo News (2026, March). Cincinnati region overtakes Columbus as Ohio’s employment king.
Entrepreneur. (2025, June 5). Procter & Gamble Layoffs: 7,000 Jobs Affected, Corporate HQ.
WCPO Cincinnati. (2025, August 26). Kroger to lay off nearly 1,000 corporate workers, including some downtown Cincinnati employees.