Industrial Boomtowns: The U.S. Metros Where Logistics & Warehousing Grew Fastest

Data centers have dominated industrial headlines — and for good reason. But, demand for warehousing and logistics space remains strong in its own right: U.S. e-commerce sales reached $340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 12.2% year-over-year and 20.2% of core retail for the highest share since 2020. And, in August, container imports hit 2.6 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs), the third-highest monthly total on record.

Much of that demand is landing in markets that were barely on the logistics map a decade ago. That’s because the e-commerce boom turned former agricultural, energy and desert metros into logistics markets in their own rights. In many of them, logistics has grown into an outsized part of the local economy by adding jobs faster than the population grew and bringing a wave of new companies and industrial space with it.

To identify where warehousing and logistics have expanded most significantly in the last decade, we ranked 131 U.S. metros with populations above 400,000 on nine indicators covering logistics employment, pay, business formation and industrial real estate, with growth weighted most heavily. See the methodology for the full breakdown. See the methodology for the full breakdown.

Here are some of the takeaways:

Overall

• Bakersfield, Calif., is the #1 industrial boomtown metro
• Six of the top 10 metros are in California’s Central Valley
• Logistics jobs grew faster than the population in 127 of the 131 metros studied