- The Annual Economic Report to the Governor found Utah among the nation's top economies in 2025
- The state saw solid, but moderating growth across most metrics last year.
- While fiscal projections for 2026 are mostly positive, housing affordability is a critical, ongoing issue
Utah’s economy continued to outpace most of the rest of the country in 2025 in spite of persistent inflation, a weakening jobs sector and a growing separation between high-income households and the rest of the country.
In its annual Economic Report to the Governor, presented Friday at a Utah Chamber event in Salt Lake City, the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute identified plenty of data points illustrating the state’s mostly enviable fiscal performance over the year past.
The state’s 3.3% unemployment rate, 1.5% job growth and 3.2% wage growth last year reflected a “durable” economy, according to the report, though those rates also reveal a path of moderation when compared to Utah’s performance metrics over the last few years.
Utah’s biggest economic concern
During comments to the 700 or so Grand America attendees on Friday morning, Gardner Institute chief economist Phil Dean pointed to one area that remains a point of concern for Utah leaders.
“Here’s a warning sign,” Dean said. “We’re in a danger zone here I think. We’re now at the lowest home ownership rate in decades.”
Dean noted that while Utah median home prices placed the state somewhere in the 7th to 10th most expensive housing market in the country in 2025, median wage rankings for the state fell well below that mark.
“It is both an economic imperative and a moral imperative,” Dean said, to find a way to build housing that allows the children and grandchildren of Utah residents to start their own households in the state.
Dean shared a graph during his talk that showed how Utah has been tracking when it comes to the median multiple, a ratio that compares median household income with the median home price.
On that scale, Utah has been performing progressively worse over the last decade, dropping from “moderately unaffordable” in the years 2014-2017 to “seriously unaffordable” in 2018-2020 to its current status, since 2021, of “severely unaffordable.”
What will 2026 bring on the economic front?
The Gardner report notes the Utah Economic Council is predicting on a national level that 2026 will see GDP growth of around 2%, inflation hovering near the 3% mark and unemployment a little over 4.5%.
The council’s 2026 Utah forecast projects:
- Continued moderate job growth supporting real wage gains
- Utah’s population to grow more rapidly than the rest of the U.S. but more slowly than in the state’s past
- Moderate growth of taxable sales (a useful measure of goods consumption)
- Further increase to the state’s median home price albeit at a slower pace with housing supply constraints continuing to weigh on new first-time homebuyers as well as influencing labor markets and impairing other consumption
The report highlighted stock market gains in 2025, driven mostly by high-flying artificial intelligence efforts that saw hundreds of billions of dollars in investment last year. Those rising valuations occurred even as most of the AI-focused efforts have yet to produce revenues commensurate with the level of investment, raising concerns about a potential AI investment bubble.
And while stock market gains helped build wealth for the highest earning Americans, middle and lower income households worked to keep pace with the rising cost of basic necessities in 2025.
Utah’s take on the AI juggernaut
During his comments at Friday’s economic summit, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox noted that fast-developing AI software is akin to most other new innovations in that the tools “can be a positive and a negative.”
Cox also highlighted the state’s efforts to oversee how AI-powered services are deployed, including the newly launched Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. He also pointed out how AI’s disruptive qualities, unlike many previous innovations, was a bigger threat to white-collar professions than working class jobs.
“We have to be thoughtful about this,” Cox said. “We can’t protect every job ... that’s just not going to be the case. What we are going to do is to make sure AI is human-centered.”
Friday’s event also included a preview of 2026 legislative priorities from Utah lawmakers and a fireside chat with Cox, Gardner Institute director Natalie Gochnour and former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.