Securities firms in New York City now employ a record 209,000 workers, and the cranes are already up.
Earlier this month, RXR and partner TF Cornerstone filed a demolition permit for the Grand Hyatt Hotel on East 42nd Street. The plan: a 95-story office tower, $6.5 billion, replacing a midtown institution that’s been there for decades. City Council cleared the project in 2021. The permit filing is 2026. That’s not hesitation. That’s confidence.
The contrast with the last few years is pretty stark. When the pandemic emptied out Midtown, the narrative wrote itself: New York was done, the exodus was real, and every lease signed in Miami was another nail. Critics of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations grabbed onto every departure announcement like it was scripture. Real estate money flooded into opposition campaigns. Lobbyists ran up their Albany tabs. The Mason-Dixon line became shorthand for everything New York supposedly couldn’t compete with anymore.
Then the numbers came in.
The New York State Department of Labor released its final 2025 job count this month. Securities industry employment in the city hit 209,000, a record. Wall Street profits and bonuses also set records last year, sending billions in unexpected income tax revenue into state and city budgets. The state now pulls 20% of all its tax revenue from the financial sector alone. That’s a structural dependency that makes Albany nervous in bad years and very quiet in good ones. Right now, it’s a windfall.
Park Avenue is where you feel it. Vacancy along the corridor sits at 7%. The newest, most modern buildings are running at 96% occupied, according to JLL research. Developers aren’t treating that as a ceiling. Three new towers are in planning stages along the avenue, with backers betting financial firms will fill the floors as fast as construction crews can pour the concrete.
“There is really only one driver of the decisions financial companies make and that is where the people they want to work for them are and where those people want to live and work,” said Mary Ann Tighe, CEO of CBRE’s Tri-State region, a broker who has worked scores of major office deals. “And New York is still a magnet for those young people.”
That line is the whole argument. It’s not about op-eds, tax rates, or what some hedge fund CEO told a reporter in 2022. Firms chase talent. The talent still comes here. Columbia, NYU, Fordham, and a dozen schools inside the five boroughs keep feeding the pipeline. Until that changes, the exodus story doesn’t hold.
Scott Rechler, RXR’s CEO, said brokers working with financial services clients told him their companies are expanding so fast that when leases come up, they always need more space than they currently have. That’s not a market in retreat.
It’s worth being straight about what the data doesn’t say, though. New York’s share of national securities employment keeps declining. Dallas, Charlotte, and Miami aren’t fictions. Firms really are building out back-office and mid-office operations in lower-cost cities. That’s a real trend and it won’t reverse. The question is whether it matters for the top of the market, the trading floors, the deal teams, the places where Wall Street actually makes its money. So far, that business hasn’t moved.
The City reported this month on the tension between the employment record and the political fight over Mamdani’s tax agenda, noting that the windfall revenues are complicating the case for both sides. Opponents of the mayor’s plan can’t easily point to a shrinking sector. Supporters can’t claim the city doesn’t depend heavily on an industry that can, eventually, reorganize itself somewhere else.
What’s concrete right now: 209,000 jobs, a 95-story tower going up on 42nd Street, Park Avenue at 96% capacity in its best buildings, and a demolition permit that says more about market psychology than any think tank report. The Grand Hyatt comes down. Something bigger goes up. That’s where things stand in 2026.