By the numbers, metro Atlanta’s economy is in the best shape it’s been in 20 years.
- Real GDP is up 3.4 percent year-over-year, the strongest growth of any major US metro
- Unemployment is 3.1 percent, the lowest since 2000
- Job growth has run positive for 41 straight months
- Median household income is up 5.2 percent year-over-year to $78,400
- Population growth is the highest of any US metro, with the metro adding roughly 70,000 new residents per year
These are the kind of numbers that economists describe as “the strongest economy of our lifetimes” — and they’re real.
So why doesn’t anyone feel good about it?
The disconnect
The disconnect is the central economic story of 2026, and it shows up everywhere.
A March 2026 survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that 66 percent of metro Atlanta residents described the local economy as “fair” or “poor,” even as the same survey showed that 68 percent said their own financial situation was “good” or “excellent.” That’s an unusually large gap between subjective experience and objective reality — bigger than the gap in 2019, when the economy was also strong.
“We’ve been here before. The data says one thing, the public says another. What we’re trying to understand is whether the public is wrong, or whether the data is missing something.”
— Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
What’s in the data that the public isn’t feeling
There are three things, and they’re all real.
1. The gains are unevenly distributed. The aggregate numbers hide substantial variation. The top quartile of metro Atlanta households has seen 8.1 percent wage growth over the past year; the bottom quartile has seen 2.4 percent. The cost of the things lower-income households spend on (housing, food, childcare) has gone up faster than the cost of the things upper-income households spend on (services, leisure).
2. The gains are in the wrong places. Most of the job growth in the metro is in two sectors: data centers and the businesses that support them, and the healthcare-and-social-services complex. Both are important, but neither is the kind of broadly-shared middle-class job growth that defined the 1990s economy.
3. The cost of housing is up a lot. Median rent in the metro is up 28 percent since 2022, and the median home price is up 31 percent. Wages have grown — but for the bottom half of households, wage growth has not kept up with housing-cost growth.
What’s in the public sentiment that the data isn’t capturing
There are also three things, and they’re also real.
1. Inflation fatigue. Even with inflation now down to 2.4 percent from its 2022 peak, the cumulative price level has risen roughly 18 percent since 2020. People are looking at absolute prices, not inflation rates, and absolute prices are meaningfully higher than they were five years ago.
2. The pandemic effect. The pandemic broke a lot of social and economic patterns. People have changed jobs, moved, re-evaluated their lives. The result is a population that is more anxious and less confident than the raw numbers would suggest.
3. Information environment. The media people consume — both traditional and social — is heavily weighted toward negative stories. People are more aware of layoffs and inflation than they are of GDP growth.
What the data actually says
Let’s look at the per-capita income chart, which is the best single number for “is the average person better off”:
- 2019: $58,400
- 2020: $59,800 (pandemic year — bounced up because of stimulus)
- 2021: $63,200
- 2022: $66,500
- 2023: $69,100
- 2024: $72,800
- 2025: $76,500
- 2026 (projected): $79,200
That’s a 36 percent increase over seven years, which is significantly faster than the long-run trend. The economy is unambiguously producing more income per person than it has been.
The question is not whether the average person has more money. They do. The question is whether that money buys what it used to. And for housing, in Atlanta, the answer is no.
What to watch
Three things will tell us whether this disconnect closes over the next 12 months:
- Housing construction. Metro Atlanta is on track to start roughly 22,000 new single-family homes in 2026, which would be the most since 2007. If this pace continues, the housing-cost pressure should ease by late 2027.
- Wage growth at the bottom. The Fed’s Atlanta wage tracker shows the bottom-quartile wage growth has been accelerating since 2024. If that continues, the gap between perception and reality should narrow.
- Public-sentiment indicators. Both the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index have been trending up since November 2024. The next read on the Conference Board index comes in late July.
“The economy is doing better than people think. The question is whether the gap closes. My view is that it will, but not as quickly as the data would suggest.”
— Bostic, in a recent speech
Aisha Bell covers business and the economy for WACN 21. Reach her at abell@wacn21.com.
