Which Industries Are Actually Growing in Austin Beyond Tech Right Now
Tech layoffs dominated the headlines. Meanwhile, life sciences, defense contracting, clean energy manufacturing, and film production have been hiring. Here's what's real, what's overstated, and wha…
Tech layoffs dominated the headlines. Meanwhile, life sciences, defense contracting, clean energy manufacturing, and film production have been hiring. Here’s what’s real, what’s overstated, and what it actually pays.
The Austin economic story in 2024 and 2025 got told almost entirely through the lens of tech: Dell’s workforce reductions, Indeed’s departure, Oracle’s relocation decisions. Read the business press and you’d be forgiven for thinking the city’s economic future is essentially a cautionary tale about overexposure to a single industry.
That framing isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete in ways that matter if you’re making an employment decision, placing a real estate bet, or trying to figure out where your business fits in a labor market that looks nothing like it did in 2021.
Texas Workforce Commission Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for Travis County tells a more complicated story. While NAICS 51—the Information sector that captures most of Austin’s software and internet employment—saw payroll contraction beginning in late 2022 and continuing through 2024, four other sectors posted year-over-year employment gains during the same window: Health Care and Social Assistance (NAICS 62), Scientific and Technical Services (NAICS 5417), Manufacturing (NAICS 31–33), and the Motion Picture and Sound Recording cluster buried inside the Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation classification.
None of them is close to replacing tech’s economic weight. But the question isn’t whether they replace tech. It’s whether they’re real, whether they’re hiring, and whether the pay is worth your time.
Life Sciences: What’s Actually Being Built, and Where
The life sciences pitch for Austin has been running since at least 2015, which is honestly long enough to make any reporter skeptical. I’ve sat through enough “Austin is becoming a biotech hub” panels to know the gap between announcement and actual jobs can stretch into years. Around 2022 and 2023, though, something shifted from press release to physical construction—and if you know where to look, you can see it.
The most significant anchor is Dell Medical School’s ongoing expansion within the UT campus. The school opened in 2016 and has been in continuous construction since. It has directly generated demand for clinical research employers along the East 38th Street and Red River corridor—what the city designates the Austin Innovation Zone. The clinical research coordination jobs weren’t theoretical capacity planning. They materialized when the physical facilities did.
Ascension Seton, the dominant health system on the west side of the district, has maintained active hiring throughout 2024. A review of Austin-market job postings on LinkedIn and Indeed in early 2025 shows Ascension Seton carrying open requisitions for clinical research coordinators ($52,000–$68,000 annually for coordinators with CRC certification or equivalent clinical experience), oncology RN specialists, and research protocol compliance roles. None of these are headline-generating positions. All represent stable, benefits-bearing employment that didn’t exist in this volume in Travis County five years ago. The postings are blunt about credentials: documented trial coordination experience or a clinical background that translates to immediate productivity. If you don’t have that background, the listings tell you plainly they don’t want your resume.
The picture at companies like Molecular Templates—Austin-based, oncology-focused, venture-dependent—illustrates a tension the boosterish coverage consistently skips. Early-stage biotech employment is volatile in ways that institutional health system employment is not. A clinical research coordinator role at Ascension Seton has the durability that comes with a major health system. A research scientist role at a company whose survival depends on venture funding and clinical trial outcomes carries a completely different risk profile. That distinction rarely makes it into the “Austin biotech is booming” coverage, but it should be the first thing anyone hears. For more context on what Ascension and St. David’s expansions mean for Austin patients, including how facility growth is reshaping employment and services across the district, the pattern is consistent with what the hiring data shows.
The Texas Enterprise Fund—the state’s primary economic development subsidy vehicle—has made biotech awards to Travis County companies in the 2022–2024 cycle. Worth scrutinizing. TEF announcements don’t reliably translate to the job numbers in the press releases, and the timeline for hiring fulfillment can run years past the announcement date. Check the award database before you get excited about a headline commitment.
TWC QCEW figures for NAICS 62 in Travis County show Health Care and Social Assistance employment growing steadily from Q3 2022 through Q3 2024. NAICS 5417—Scientific Research and Development Services—showed more modest but consistent growth over the same period. The clinical and health care employment growth is real and substantial. The biotech research employment growth is real but smaller, earlier-stage, and more volatile. The land-use picture—lab space, zoning, anchor institutions—is genuinely improving, but it’s a five-to-ten-year build, not something that shows up in next quarter’s numbers. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Clean Energy and Semiconductors: The Manufacturing Jobs Austin Doesn’t Talk About
Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas in Del Valle and Samsung’s semiconductor fab in Taylor get regularly cited in Austin economic development materials and just as regularly miscategorized as “tech” employment. They are not. These are manufacturing jobs. They require different credentials, different hiring pipelines, and operate on different pay structures than software engineering. Grouping them with Austin’s information sector flattens a distinction that matters enormously for anyone trying to understand what’s actually available.
Tesla Giga Texas began production in 2022 and employs approximately 20,000 workers at its Del Valle facility. The workforce is production associates, manufacturing engineers, quality technicians, and logistics staff—not primarily software developers. The hiring pipeline runs through community college programs and vocational credentialing rather than four-year CS degrees. Benefits are comprehensive: health, retirement matching, production bonuses. This is closer to how Detroit used to work than how Austin’s tech corridor does. That’s not a criticism. For a lot of workers, it’s better.
Samsung’s Taylor fab is a longer-horizon story. The company committed $17 billion starting in 2021, and construction advanced significantly through 2024. The timeline for full hiring has slipped from original projections—partly because of the semiconductor market cycle that also hit Samsung’s global capital spending. Taylor is in Williamson County, not Travis, which matters for commute patterns and which workforce programs serve it. Full staffing is still ahead of where the facility sits today, and when exactly it gets there is a question nobody has answered precisely. I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims to know.
NXP Semiconductors on Ed Bluestein Boulevard is the oldest and least-covered part of this story. NXP employs hundreds of workers in Austin in fab operations, process engineering, and chip design. It has operated continuously through cycles that saw other semiconductor companies exit the city entirely. It’s a stabilizing presence in the manufacturing base that rarely surfaces in coverage focused on announcements rather than continuity. The facility has been running long enough that institutional knowledge actually exists there—which you genuinely cannot say about either Tesla or Samsung yet.
On the clean energy side, the Cedar Park and Leander stretch of Ranch Road 620 has developed a visible concentration of solar installation contractors doing commercial and residential work. Installation is skilled-trades work, often organized around journeyman and apprentice pipelines through IBEW—legitimate employment, but project-based and structured differently from salaried manufacturing jobs. Installer compensation varies by project and contractor backlog, which introduces volatility that a Tesla production associate doesn’t face. That distinction gets lost when “clean energy jobs” gets used as a single category.
TWC NAICS 31–33 figures for combined Travis and Williamson counties show manufacturing employment growing as the Tesla and Samsung footprints have materialized, with the caveat that the data lags construction hiring. Samsung Taylor’s numbers will show up more fully once the facility ramps to target staffing.
Defense Contracting: Austin’s Least-Covered Major Employer
Ask a well-informed Austinite to name the city’s major defense employers and most will struggle past one or two names. This is a genuine coverage gap. The defense contracting sector in North Austin represents substantial, stable, high-wage employment that has been growing quietly for a decade, and it almost never makes the business press. Part of the reason is structural—classified work limits what companies can discuss publicly. Part of it, if I’m being honest, is that Austin media tends to find defense contracting less interesting than the next consumer app. That preference is a disservice to readers trying to understand where the actual jobs are.
Applied Research Laboratories at UT anchors this sector. ARL:UT, headquartered at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus off Burnet Road, is a federally funded research and development center with the Department of Defense as its primary sponsor. As a unit of a public university it offers more transparency than private contractors, and it has publicly reported employing several hundred research scientists, engineers, and technical staff. These are primarily salaried positions, many requiring security clearances, with compensation that reflects the credentials involved. Research scientist roles at comparable institutions post at $80,000–$120,000 depending on experience, with full benefits.
The private contractor sector around Camp Mabry and the I-35/US-183 interchange in North Austin includes confirmed Austin operations from CACI International, Leidos, BAE Systems, L3Harris, and Radiance Technologies, which has expanded its Austin presence in recent years. A review of Austin-specific job postings from these employers in early 2025 shows active requisitions for systems engineers, cybersecurity analysts, and program managers—and every posting specifies active Secret or Top Secret/SCI clearances. That requirement is where a lot of otherwise-qualified candidates hit a wall.
Here’s what most coverage doesn’t explain clearly: obtaining an initial Secret clearance takes roughly six to twelve months from investigation initiation. Top Secret with SCI access runs twelve to twenty-four months or more, depending on background complexity and investigation backlog. An Austin software engineer laid off from a tech company who wants to pivot to defense can be hired contingent on a clearance—but the cash flow implications deserve a direct conversation during offer negotiation, not after you’ve already given notice. Companies in this space typically sponsor clearances for strong candidates. The lag time is manageable for someone with savings. For someone who needs a paycheck immediately, the timeline is more complicated than the initial offer suggests. Find out exactly how the company handles interim clearances and transition pay before you sign anything.
The physical footprint of this sector is visible in commercial permit activity if you know what you’re looking for. Cleared-facility space requires physical security standards—SCIFs—that are expensive to build and that drive demand for specific North Austin flex-office and industrial properties near the 183/I-35 interchange. Build-out permits for this type of space appeared in Austin Development Services filings with enough regularity in 2023 and 2024 to confirm the sector is expanding rather than holding steady. It’s not dramatic architecture. Small square footage, high construction cost per foot, no signage. But it shows up in the permit database if you’re watching.
Film and Production: An Employment Story, Not a Lifestyle Story
The Austin film industry gets covered as a cultural identity story. That framing causes journalists to miss what it actually is in employment terms: a project-based skilled-trades industry with a defined pay structure, a state incentive program that determines its competitiveness against Georgia and New Mexico, and two anchor production facilities whose occupancy tells you more about the sector’s health than any amount of film festival coverage.
Troublemaker Studios in South Austin and Austin Studios on the east side near Mueller are the city’s two primary production anchors. Both vary significantly year to year based on what’s getting made—production is a project business, not a factory. As of 2024 and into 2025, activity has been recovering from recent disruptions, though the streaming market’s retreat from peak content spending has put a ceiling on the recovery. The absolute spending numbers are lower than the 2020–2022 peak. Worth acknowledging rather than burying in a paragraph about Austin’s creative economy.
The Austin Film Commission publishes annual reports through the city’s Economic Development Department. These are the most reliable public source on production spend and direct employment, and they’re freely available. The data is seasonal and project-dependent, not steady payroll—a production that shoots for three months generates concentrated hiring followed by concentrated non-employment when it wraps. That cycle is the job. Understanding it before you commit to a production career is more useful than any amount of enthusiasm about the industry.
What actually drives productions to Austin rather than Atlanta or Albuquerque is the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program, administered by the Texas Film Commission. The program provides eligible productions a grant based on qualified in-state spending, with higher rates for productions that hit Texas-resident crew hire thresholds. The Austin Film Festival—a 30-plus-year institution anchored in October—helps establish Austin as a film market. But the incentive math is what determines whether a production actually shoots here. Any line producer will tell you: the location scouting happens after the incentive calculation, not before.
The local IATSE chapter represents crew in camera, grip, electric, and art department crafts. Austin-market day rates based on recent production payroll patterns: production assistants run approximately $200–$250 per day; grip and electric technicians $350–$500; directors of photography on mid-budget productions $600–$1,500 depending on format and project budget. These are project rates, not annualized salaries, and the gap between them is significant. Someone working three months per year at $250 per day—$6,000 per month gross during production—has to cover ten months of expenses from savings or secondary work. Experienced Austin crew members access IATSE health and pension contributions on qualifying productions, supplemented by marketplace insurance between projects. The system works for people with consistent project access and the discipline to manage insurance enrollment during gaps. It doesn’t work well for crew who are new enough to the industry that they don’t yet have the network to stay consistently booked. Some of them figure this out around month four of their first project gap. Better to know before you get there.
The Geography: Where These Jobs Actually Are
Sector announcements rarely include a map, and that omission costs job-seekers real money. The physical geography of Austin’s diversifying employment base doesn’t center on downtown, the Domain, or North MoPac. If you’re making a housing decision based on where you expect to work, that matters more than almost anything else in this article.
Life sciences and clinical research employment concentrates along the East 38th Street/Red River medical district and the UT campus edge, extending into Mueller on Airport Boulevard. Good bike and bus access from East Austin and central neighborhoods; poor access from the suburbs without a car. A commute from Pflugerville or Round Rock to East 38th is a 35-to-45-minute drive with no transit alternative worth considering. That’s not disqualifying, but it’s daily.
Defense contractor employment clusters in North Austin near the I-35/US-183 interchange, along Burnet Road near the Pickle Research Campus, and in commercial parks near Camp Mabry on the western city edge. Cedar Park, Leander, and Round Rock commuters have relatively direct highway access. South Austin and East Austin commuters do not.
Clean energy manufacturing splits into two locations with no good transit serving either. Tesla Giga Texas is in Del Valle, east Travis County—accessible from East Austin and the Bastrop-area communities by car, 20 to 30 minutes from East Austin in reasonable traffic. Samsung Taylor is a 30-to-40-minute drive from Central Austin on a good day, in Williamson County, with no public transit connection. For a production associate earning $45,000–$55,000 annually, transportation costs and commute time eat a meaningful percentage of total compensation. That’s worth putting into a spreadsheet before accepting an offer. Anyone weighing a housing decision around these job corridors will find the tradeoffs detailed in our coverage of Austin-area suburban real costs — including what Kyle, Pflugerville, and Hutto actually cost after taxes, HOAs, tolls, and closing-day surprises — directly relevant to the math.
Film production work concentrates in South Austin and the east side near Mueller—more central than the manufacturing corridor, but crew members regularly travel to other Texas locations during active production regardless of where the studio sits. The geography of the two studios is, practically speaking, less relevant than the fact that production work is mobile.
What These Jobs Pay and What They Actually Require
The following figures come from Austin-specific job postings reviewed in early 2025, not national BLS averages, which frequently diverge from the local market.
Clinical research coordinators at entry level with CRC certification or relevant clinical experience post at $52,000–$68,000 at health system employers including Ascension Seton and St. David’s HealthCare. These roles want documented trial coordination experience or a clinical background. Someone with a nursing background has a clearer path than someone with a four-year degree in an unrelated field. That’s worth knowing before you spend months pursuing applications that aren’t going anywhere.
Tesla manufacturing roles include full employer benefits—health insurance, 401(k) matching, production incentives. Solar installation work typically does not, though unionized shops affiliated with IBEW provide access to union health and pension plans on a different structure. The difference between those two benefit situations is not trivial for a worker running the numbers.
Cleared defense contractor roles post at a meaningful premium. A cybersecurity analyst role at a cleared contractor runs $90,000–$110,000; a comparable non-cleared role at a software company typically posts $75,000–$95,000. Cleared roles include full benefits and retirement matching. The catch is citizenship and a background that can survive adjudication—financial history, criminal record, foreign national contacts, and drug use history all factor into the investigation. Clearance eligibility isn’t just paperwork.
Film and production day rates appear above. The structural point that bears repeating: production work in Austin is not a path to employer-sponsored health insurance or retirement through a single employer. Entry-level crew making $250 per day on a three-month production grosses roughly $15,000 for that project. The rest of the year is their problem.
What’s Real, What’s Still on Paper, and What Nobody Knows Yet
Austin remains structurally concentrated in technology employment. NAICS 51 still accounts for a larger share of Travis County private-sector payroll than any of these diversifying sectors comes close to replacing. The diversification story is real in the sense that other sectors have grown meaningfully while tech has plateaued—it is not real in the sense that Austin has achieved the distributed employment base of Houston or Dallas-Fort Worth, both of which have much broader industry mixes. Anyone who tells you Austin has “diversified beyond tech” is describing a direction, not a destination. There’s a difference, and it matters if you’re making a ten-year commitment to this market.
Here’s the honest accounting.
Currently operational and actively hiring: Health care and clinical research employment in the medical district corridor, with stable institutions backing the positions. Defense contractor employment in North Austin, documented through lease activity, SCIF construction permits, and active job postings from multiple employers. Tesla manufacturing in Del Valle, at scale and publicly reported.
Real but not fully realized: Samsung Taylor represents a credible, documented commitment with investment to match—but the hiring timeline has slipped and will continue to lag the facility’s operational ramp. Austin’s private biotech employment is genuine early-stage growth, but it remains smaller and more volatile than the institutional story implies. Most NAICS 5417 growth in Travis County is coming from institutional research, not startup biotech.
Genuinely uncertain: Molecular Templates’ trajectory depends on clinical trial outcomes and funding conditions outside the company’s control. The Texas film incentive program’s competitive rate versus Georgia or New Mexico is a legislative decision that can change quickly—and has in other states, immediately. The cleantech installer corridor developing into something more durable depends on solar adoption rates and policy structures that aren’t fixed.
Anyone who wants to verify any of this independently can do it without a data subscription or a source willing to go on background. The TWC’s QCEW portal allows NAICS-level employment and wage queries by county. Austin Development Services’ permit search shows commercial filings by address and use type. The Austin Film Commission publishes annual reports through the city’s Economic Development Department. The Texas Enterprise Fund award database is public record.
What those sources show is not a city that has transcended its tech concentration. It’s a city with a more complex employment base than its own coverage suggests—and this kind of analysis is exactly what we pursue in our business and professional coverage of Austin’s evolving economy. There are real opportunities in specific sectors, real credential requirements, and real pay, for workers who look past the narrative that has dominated the business press for the past three years. That narrative isn’t false. It just has some expensive blind spots.
