Baton Rouge is king

Louisiana hit an all-time high of 2.01 million nonfarm jobs in May, and the fine print says who's carrying it: Baton Rouge added more jobs than any other Louisiana metro over the past year, while New Orleans and Shreveport shrank.

Why it matters: Baton Rouge isn't riding the state's wave right now—it's making it.

• The metro added 7,900 jobs over the year, up 1.8%, a full point ahead of Louisiana's overall 0.8% growth rate, according to a new report from Leaders for a Better Louisiana.

Driving the growth: The metro's job engine right now is industrial construction, and it's not particularly diversified, reports The Partnership's second-quarter State of the Regional Economy.

• Three mega projects are hiring at once: Hyundai's steel mill, CF Industries' ammonia plant in Ascension and Linde's air separation unit, alongside the I-10 widening.
• Construction alone added 6,500 jobs over the year, nearly twice as many as leisure, health care and professional services combined.
• That's a construction spike, as RedEye reported in June, not evidence of a diversified economy—a distinction that still holds.
• Note of caution: Air Products canceled its $4.5 billion Louisiana Clean Energy Complex in Ascension Parish in late June, citing financial returns that fell short of its own targets—a decision cheered by Lake Maurepas-area residents who'd fought the project's carbon capture plans for years.

The gap: Only two other metros are even in the conversation, and both got there riding a single project Baton Rouge doesn't have.

• Monroe (+1.3%) relied on Meta's data center build. Lake Charles (+1.2%) leaned on LNG construction.
• New Orleans lost jobs (-0.5%). Shreveport did too (-0.6%). Baton Rouge is pushing the state average up, while its two biggest peers are pulling it down.

The catch: Business formation tells a messier story.

• East Baton Rouge Parish logged 8,971 new business applications in 2025, up 25% from 2019, Census Bureau figures show—real growth, but short of the parish's 2021 peak of nearly 13,000.
• Ascension, Lafayette and Calcasieu parishes all grew faster in percentage terms over that stretch. Baton Rouge still files more new-business paperwork than anywhere else in the state.

State of the state: Zoom out and the numbers back up the local story.

• Louisiana's economy grew 2.7% over the year, 4th-fastest in the South—behind North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina—and right in line with U.S. growth.
• The state's own jobs number tied for 6th-fastest nationally in May and ranked 4th in the South, behind North Carolina, West Virginia and South Carolina.
• The state's tax code jumped six spots on the Tax Foundation's competitiveness index, the biggest climb in the South, after 2024's flat-rate overhaul and the death of the corporate franchise tax.
• Home insurance is still the drag: $5,986 a year on average, second-highest in the South and nearly 2.4 times the national number.

The bottom line: Baton Rouge is doing the heavy lifting on jobs. Whether it can do the same for new business determines whether this is a boom or a plateau.