Harris County ranks No. 1 in America’s Best Counties 2026

Harris County ranked No. 1 in America’s Best Counties 2026 with 477 corporate facility projects and $11.482 billion in capital investment, ahead of every other county or parish in the country.

Site Selection built the ranking on Conway Projects Database data covering January 2025 through March 2026. Harris County’s 477 deals far outpaced Cook County, Illinois, at 326 and Dallas County at 191, and its investment total was more than $5 billion higher than Franklin County, Ohio, the nearest county in the top 20 at $6.22 billion. After Harris County, the top five overall counties were Maricopa County, Arizona; Dallas County; Cook County; Tarrant County, Texas; and Franklin County.

Harris County now has just over 5 million residents, making it the third-most-populous county in the United States, and the Houston metro has about 7.8 million residents. The county spans 1,777 square miles, including 981 unincorporated square miles, and includes 34 cities, with access to ports, highways, industrial sites and a deep labor pool. Craig Rhodes, senior vice president of economic development for the Greater Houston Partnership, said the result reflected “the county and its cities coming together to support quality economic development.”

Harris County lost more than 65,000 more people than it gained through domestic migration in the early years of the 2020s, and draft FEMA flood maps released in 2026 could affect more than 420,000 properties countywide, including nearly 350,000 single-family homes, if finalized. Those maps would be the first comprehensive update to floodplain boundaries since 2007.

Harris County’s economic roots date to 1826, when John Richardson Harris laid out Harrisburg along Buffalo Bayou and Brays Bayou and opened a sawmill and general store. Harris County’s business-climate pitch includes green building abatements, state of Texas incentives, tax abatement, Texas Enterprise Zone programs and federal incentives.