(The Center Square) – Some are pushing back after new rankings from CNBC placed Minnesota among the top five states nationally as one of the “best states for business.”
The America's Top States for Business in 2026 rankings were released earlier this month and listed Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Minnesota as the overall top-five best states for business. West Virginia, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Alaska, and Hawaii were the bottom five.
While the results gained national attention, both positive and negative, Minnesotans also addressed the rankings.
“Businesses in top industries, from healthcare to renewable energy and manufacturing, understand the benefits of investing and growing in Minnesota,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “Proud be ranked a top five state for business.”
Others in the state find the ranking questionable though, pointing to everything from population loss to high unemployment.
“This ranking is completely bogus,” said John Phelan, an economist with the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment. “These rankings … are not correlated in any meaningful way with what businesses actually do, such as start themselves or hire people.”
Phelan compared the rankings to the population trends in both the lowest- and highest-scoring states in the “quality of life” category, which makes up 12% of the overall ranking.
“The top ranked states lost a total of 57,641 residents while the bottom ranked states gained a total of 211,511, nearly four times as many,” Phelan said. “People, it would seem, are fleeing states with higher qualities of life for states with lower ones.”
Some of the factors CNBC, a business news outlet, looked at in that category included “worker protections,” “inclusiveness” in state laws, and even “reproductive rights.”
“It is, then, a ranking that equates more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ policies with a higher ‘quality of life,’” Phelan said.
Minnesota ranked fourth in that category.
The other categories included infrastructure, economy, workforce, cost of doing business, technology and innovation, business friendliness, access to capital, education, and cost of living.
“The fundamentals of the study, now in its 20th year, remain the same: identifying the factors companies consider when making site selection decisions, and where states are focusing their economic development efforts to win jobs and business,” CNBC said. “Each category is weighted based on how frequently states use them as a selling point.”
The study took into account 138 metrics across the 10 categories.
Dustin Grage, a Minnesota-based policy analyst, echoed Phelan’s concerns with the ranking.
“Minnesota has lost more business under your tenure than any other administration in state history, Tim,” Grage said in response to Walz. “Nobody is buying your gaslighting anymore.”
Minnesota’s worst ranking was in the “cost of doing business” category, where it came in at 31st. The others, where infrastructure, seventh; economy, eighth; education, 10th; technology and innovation, 14th; business friendliness, 16th; access to capital, 21st; cost of living, 22nd; and workforce, 27th.
