JPMorgan Chase may have just debuted its high‑profile, skyline‑redefining global headquarters in New York, but that doesn’t mean the financial giant’s long‑running shift in job growth away from the city will reverse anytime soon.
In his closely watched annual letter to shareholders, CEO Jamie Dimon warned that New York — the largest U.S. property market — risks losing additional jobs and businesses as high taxes and rising costs cut its competitiveness.
While New York “has much going for it, particularly for financial companies” because of its “extraordinary local talent,” Dimon wrote that the city also faces the highest combined city and state corporate taxes and the highest individual income and state taxes in the country.
“No matter who you are, you need to deal with reality and the truth,” Dimon wrote. “People often make this a moral or loyalty issue, but it is not. Companies need to remain competitive in this very tough, fast‑moving world. Higher taxes mean lower returns on capital and less competitiveness by their nature. Cities — like individuals, companies and countries — need to compete.”
The warning comes as several large states advance new tax measures aimed at high earners. Washington has approved a new levy on income above $1 million, a notable change for a state that historically avoided taxing wages, while Massachusetts collects from its voter‑approved surtax on seven‑figure incomes. In California, a proposed ballot initiative would impose a one‑time wealth tax on billionaires, a move that has drawn legal scrutiny.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed raising taxes on individuals earning more than $1 million annually and on the city’s most profitable companies to help close a budget gap. Mamdani has also floated a 9.5% property tax increase if additional revenue can’t be raised from high-income earners.
‘Exodus’ as result of high taxes
Dimon said states with high taxes and elevated living costs, driven by tax levies and regulatory burdens, are already seeing “a fairly large exodus of people and jobs,” noting that the trend doesn’t always show up as headline‑grabbing corporate departures but also in where companies choose to grow their head count.
For example, even though New York remains the bank’s global headquarters, JPMorgan has reduced its New York head count to about 24,000 from roughly 30,000 a decade ago, while expanding its Texas workforce to about 32,000 from 26,000 in 2015, according to Dimon.
“This trend will likely continue,” he said.
Dimon warned that losing businesses and residents “can be a disaster for a city,” pointing to the combination of high taxes, office rents and operating costs that helped push nearly half of 125 Fortune 500 companies out of New York in the 1970s.
“No city — or company or country — has a divine right to success,” he wrote.
Million‑dollar earners — less than 1% of New York’s personal‑income‑tax filers — already pay about 40% of both the state and the city’s personal income taxes, according to the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission. The group has warned that further tax hikes on the wealthy could hurt “New York’s value proposition” and accelerate the city’s declining share of high‑income residents who “provide significant revenue critical to support services.”
Moves to Texas, Florida
New York’s tax base “has been eroded,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a Politico event in March, pointing to wealthy residents relocating to places such as Palm Beach, Florida.
“We are in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden on their corporations and on their individuals,” Hochul said. “Remote work changed everything. There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan or work in New York state and they were captives to our state. That’s not the case anymore. Wall Street — businesses — are looking at Texas. They’re going there because of the tax rate. We have to be smart about this.”
JPMorgan is far from the only New York‑based company moving incremental job growth elsewhere.
Goldman Sachs is developing an 800,000‑square‑foot campus in Dallas expected to house more than 5,000 employees, while Apollo Global Management has been said to be exploring a second U.S. headquarters in Texas or South Florida.
More broadly, about 158 firms managing $993 billion in assets, including AllianceBernstein and Elliott Management, moved their headquarters out of New York between early 2020 and early 2023, according to a Bloomberg study of corporate filings.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has also helped fuel the trend, relocating Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami. While Griffin remains an investor in Manhattan — including a partnership with Vornado Realty Trust and Rudin to build the supertall tower at 350 Park Ave. — Citadel is building a 1.2 million‑square‑foot headquarters in Miami’s Brickell financial district, and Griffin reportedly said the city could rival Wall Street as the next major financial hub.