The latest corporate relocation to Texas might also be the tastiest.
Fast food chicken chain KFC announced plans last week to move its headquarters from Kentucky to the Metroplex. It came close on the heels of an announcement earlier this month that real estate services website Realtor.com planned to move to Austin, making its home in what it predicts will be the most populous state in the nation within 20 years.
Relocations to the Lone Star State have cooled since the turn of the decade when dozens upon dozens of companies stampeded to open headquarters there. And states like Georgia and the Carolinas are increasingly coming for its title.
But 2024 was the first year since 2021 that Texas corporate relos inched up, and site selection experts say 2025 is already setting up to come in hot.
Texas saw its number of corporate relocations inch up from 2023 to 2024.
After a year of uncertainty surrounding the presidential election and capital markets, JLL Managing Director Torrey Littlejohn said KFC and Realtor.com's arrival could be the beginning of a fresh wave of relocations to Texas.
“You can't push pause forever, and so what we're seeing right now is a lot of people have pushed play,” said Littlejohn, who co-leads JLL's tenant representation team and represents national corporate office clients in facility and site acquisition.
“The velocity of transactions and activity that we're seeing is huge for the first six to eight weeks of the year.”
Texas’ business-friendly environment and lack of personal and corporate income taxes has long made it a premier destination for corporate relocations, though states like Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina are making a push up the charts.
After crowning the Lone Star State as the best business climate in the U.S. a year ago, Site Selection Magazine dropped Texas to No. 4 alongside Tennessee and behind the previously mentioned locations based on its November 2024 site selector survey.
Yet Dallas still topped the magazine's ranking of best cities for headquarters, followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, Atlanta and Nashville.
State officials are hoping to solidify Texas as “the headquarters of headquarters,” as the Office of Gov. Greg Abbott calls the state. Last year, Texas snagged 24 out-of-state headquarters relocations, the first time that number has increased over the previous year since 2021, according to a list put out by Abbott's office.
2021 was the height of the state's acceleration period as an HQ hub. Texas brought in 42 headquarters relocations in 2020 and 79 the following year. The number dropped to 38 in 2022 and just 17 in 2023.
Last year, the state also saw the number of headquarters moving from California to Texas rebound as 11 companies made the jump. In total, Texas has seen 314 headquarters relocations over the last decade, with nearly half of those — 156 — coming from California.
Dallas skyline
Despite a relative cooling off from the white-hot pace of 2020-21, site selection researcher The Boyd Co. maintains Texas remains a top choice for corporation relocations.
“Some of the most high-growth submarkets today are in the Dallas Metroplex region,” principal John Boyd Jr. said of headquarters selection. “Markets like Plano, Frisco and McKinney are very much in demand.”
Companies are on the hunt for workers, which is something Texas has in spades. Texas is on track to surpass California as the nation's most populous state by 2045, per a Realtor.com analysis of its own data and figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“Texas continues to be a big winner with respect to talent migration,” Boyd said.
DFW also topped U-Haul's Growth Metro of 2024 list by having the largest net gains of the moving companies' customers taking one-way trips into the Metroplex. The state’s Austin and Houston metros also placed within the company's top 10.
The connectivity of Texas, whether through Port Houston or the highways and airports linking DFW with the global marketplace, is one of the most attractive reasons for corporations to move to the state, Boyd said. Plus, SpaceX's rocket launch facility in Cameron County links the state to space.
“It's impossible to underscore how significant the space industry is,” Boyd said. “Every industry relies on satellites in outer space — healthcare, banking, finance, transportation, defense.”
The impending rise of Y’all Street is seen as another feather in the state’s cap that can be used to attract companies, Boyd and Littlejohn said.
The Texas Stock Exchange aims to host its first listings in 2026 and establish its headquarters in the heart of Dallas, including executive offices, a conference center and a broadcast center. The New York Stock Exchange also announced plans to reincorporate its Chicago branch in Dallas as NYSE Texas.
“The stock exchanges might be a little late to the game, because this has really been a great place for financial services clients to relocate the labor base [for the past five to 10 years],” Littlejohn said.
