Five leading talent attraction rankings measure talent from different angles. Read together, they show a proposition splitting across three levels: cities build the appeal, national governments set the limits, and the cost of living decides who stays.
TPBO’s rankings & insights specialist Abhinav Bhole read the five side by side. Here’s what he found.
No longer just about quality of life
For most of the past decade the advice given to cities competing for talent was consistent. Improve quality of life, and skilled people will follow.
The 2025 IMD World Talent Ranking suggests that advice now needs revising. When IMD asked international executives what would persuade them to accept a role abroad, the answers given most often were financial security and tangible benefits. Before the pandemic, quality of life, cultural fit and language ranked higher.
That shift moves the contest onto ground cities control only in part. Salaries are set by employers, visa rules and tax rates by national governments, and housing costs by thirty years of planning decisions. The things a city can change quickly, its image, its events, the warmth of its welcome, now sit lower in what people say they weigh.
For our upcoming special edition on Talent Attraction Leaders Europe & North America (released this September) we read five leading rankings side by side: the Global Talent Competitiveness Index, the IMD World Talent Ranking, QS Best Student Cities, the Global Power City Index and the Oxford Economics Global Cities Index. Together they show where a city’s advantage comes from, and how easily it can be taken away.
What we mean by talent attraction
Talent attraction is often used as shorthand for recruiting highly skilled professionals. In practice it covers students, researchers, entrepreneurs, technicians and creative workers, and people who arrive for one reason and stay for another.
It helps to read it as a sequence. A city draws people in, develops them, and then either keeps them or loses them. One caveat: a university city that educates thousands of international graduates and then watches them leave will still look healthy in the rankings.
Five instruments, five different questions
Global Talent Competitiveness Index (INSEAD and Portulans Institute). Now in its eleventh edition, the GTCI scores 135 national economies on 77 indicators and separates what a country puts into its talent system from what it gets out. In 2025 Singapore took first place for the first time, ending a Swiss run that had lasted since 2013. European economies hold 18 of the top 25 positions. The United States fell to ninth, its lowest placing in the history of the index and down from third in 2023. The ranking’s limitation matters here. Earlier editions carried a companion city ranking; the 2025 edition covers economies only.
IMD World Talent Ranking. IMD assesses 69 economies on 31 criteria across three factors of equal weight: Investment and Development, Appeal, and Readiness. Switzerland held first place in 2025 for the tenth consecutive year. What IMD adds is intent, since much of its data comes from a survey of international executives. That survey is also its boundary, because researchers, students and public sector talent are under-represented in it.
QS Best Student Cities. This is the only one of the five focused specifically on the attractiveness of cities to students. The 2027 edition, published in July 2026, ranks 150 cities across 59 higher education systems on six indicators, among them university strength, employer activity and affordability. Seoul took first place for a second year with a perfect score, ahead of Tokyo and London. Europe holds six of the top ten: London third, Munich joint fifth, Paris seventh, Berlin eighth, Vienna ninth and Zurich tenth. No North American city appears in the top ten. Affordability is scored openly here, and that is where the ranking bites hardest.
Global Power City Index (Mori Memorial Foundation). The GPCI evaluates 48 major cities on 72 indicators across six urban functions, from economy and research to livability and accessibility. In 2025 London held first place for a fourteenth consecutive year, albeit with a slightly lower score. Tokyo rose to second for the first time after nine years in third, and New York came third. The GPCI scores cities from the point of view of the people who use them. With a field of only 48 cities, most mid-sized European and North American cities do not appear at all.
Oxford Economics Global Cities Index. The broadest of the five, covering the 1,000 largest cities on 27 indicators across five categories, including human capital and quality of life. In 2025 New York led for a second year, followed by London and Paris, with 34 United States cities in the global top 100. It is the only one of the five that can place a mid-sized city in a global frame. Its bias is scale. New York leads overall while ranking 168th on environment and 161st on governance, with high housing expenditure and low equality among the weaknesses the index itself lists.
Almost every talent decision is about a city
People take jobs in Munich, not in Germany.
The factors that decide whether a move succeeds are local: the rent, the commute, the school place, whether a partner can find work, whether the professional network is dense enough that leaving one employer does not mean leaving the city. National averages smooth all of this away, which is why a country can look strong while its main city becomes unaffordable for the people it needs.
Looking at the rankings, countries seem to matter more than they did four years ago, but in a narrower way. National policy now works as a gate: It decides who may arrive, how long they may stay, and whether they may work after graduating. Cities decide whether living there is good enough to keep them.
Every ranking now penalises cost
The five rankings converge on a familiar profile: strong universities, a deep labour market, research capacity, good international connections and trusted institutions.
The more revealing agreement is cost, which appears as a constraint, under different names, across the rankings. QS scores affordability directly. IMD folds cost of living into its Appeal factor. The GPCI attributes weaker 2025 results in several Western cities, Paris and Amsterdam among them, to inflationary pressure. Oxford Economics lists housing expenditure among New York’s principal weaknesses. Five methodologies designed for different purposes keep encountering the same constraint.
Their disagreements cluster around the same few cities. New York is first in the Oxford Economics index and third in the GPCI, yet absent from the QS top ten, where its affordability score is 6.2 out of 100. London has led the GPCI for fourteen years and sits second in Oxford Economics, but ranks third among student cities, and QS identifies cost as the single weakness holding it below Seoul and Tokyo. No city in the United Kingdom ranks higher than 95th out of 150 on affordability.
These are not contradictions waiting to be resolved. They are a reminder that the best city for talent is not a single quantity. A city that reads one low position as a verdict on its whole proposition has misunderstood the instrument.
A country can weaken while its cities stay strong
London’s six-year run at the top ended with the edition published in 2025. Seoul has led every edition since, including the 2027 Edition released in July 2026. QS attributes the change to cost rather than to any weakening of London’s universities.
National policy has also become a visible variable rather than a background condition. New international student enrolment in the United States fell by 17 per cent in autumn 2025, the largest non-pandemic decline in eleven years. New F-1 visa issuances fell by 36 per cent, with issuances in India, the largest sending country, down by more than 60 per cent. Canada plans to admit 155,000 newly arriving international students in 2026, close to half the 2024 figure. None of these decisions was taken in Boston, New Delhi or Toronto. All of them land there.
The result is a widening gap between national and city results. The United States sits ninth in the 2025 GTCI while American cities still take 34 of the top 100 places in the Oxford Economics index. That distance is remarkable.
What this means for North America and Europe
Our special edition focuses on both continents across the Atlantic, so here a few thoughts on what stands out.
North America
The proposition remains strong where it has always been strong: large metropolitan labour markets, research universities, venture capital, and a density of employers that allows a person to change jobs without changing city. The exposure sits at both ends. At entry, national permit policy can change faster than any city can respond. At the point of staying, cost has become disqualifying for the younger part of the pipeline.
The QS affordability scores for American student cities, Boston at 5.3 and New York and San Francisco at 6.2 out of 100, describe a pipeline in which access is increasingly shaped by family wealth alongside ability. The levers these cities still control are housing supply, transport cost and the quality of the arrival experience.
Europe
European economies hold 18 of the top 25 GTCI places, and six of the ten best student cities are European. The structural advantage is distribution. Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich and Amsterdam each hold strong positions, so the continent does not depend on a single gateway city.
Two pressures work against it: housing costs in the most successful European cities are rising towards the levels that have already damaged London’s standing among students, and several national governments are managing inflows downward for reasons that have little to do with talent strategy.
What rankings cannot measure: whether people stay
A city should not set out to manage its ranking. Most indicators respond to conditions that take years to shift, and several are national.
The better use is diagnostic. Rankings are most valuable at the points where they disagree with a city’s own view of itself. If local surveys report high satisfaction while an external index scores affordability poorly, that gap is the finding. And a poor result is most useful when it is specific. Twenty-eighth overall tells a city almost nothing. Ninety-fifth out of 150 on affordability tells it where to look, and what to argue for with the national government.
One thing none of the five instruments measures is whether the people who arrive in a city are still there in five or ten years. That is the question a talent strategy finally answers to, and it sits outside every ranking on the page. The numbers can tell us how well a place attracts but they remain largely silent on whether it keeps.
Hardly surprising: talent retention is a core theme across all the case studies in our upcoming edition on Talent Attraction Leaders Europe & North America. Watch this space.
Sources: Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2025 (INSEAD/Portulans Institute); IMD World Talent Ranking 2025; QS Best Student Cities 2027; Global Power City Index 2025 (Mori Memorial Foundation); Oxford Economics Global Cities Index 2025.
New rankings appear all the time and we will keep a track on those that we consider most relevant, with location-specific summaries and snapshots available via our Observatories of Cities and Countries.
