Salt Lake City is in the top quarter of large U.S. cities in job creation.

 

The Gallup survey finds Salt Lake City ranked #17. The figures show 35% of workers here say their employers are hiring while just 16% say their employers are letting employees go - which gives Salt Lake City a "Job Creation Index" score of 18.

The top five cities are Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Nashville and Orlando. All have "Job Creation Index" scores above 20.

The bottom five are Providence, Riverside, New York, Sacramento and Buffalo with scores below 8.

The numbers are based on employee perceptions of their workplace hiring, but they tend to correlate well with national unemployment numbers.

The large metro areas in the South tend to have better job creation situations than those in the East and the West. Eight of the top 10 metro areas with the highest Job Creation Index scores are in the South, while eight of the bottom 10 are in the East or West.

It should also be noted that the largest metro areas overall -- New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago -- ranked closer to the bottom of the list than to the top.

Gallup's Job Creation Index tends to be a strong predictor of jobless claims at the national level, and these results at the local level may also be an indicator of future local unemployment rates. The top five large metros in Gallup's Job Creation Index for 2011 had an average unemployment rate of 7.4% in January 2012, according to not-seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the bottom five large metros' unemployment rates averaged 10.7%.