CNBC, the nation’s leading business network, came out this morning with its 2025 list of “America’s Top States for Business” and awarded top honors, once again, to Geor — Oh, wait. No. Not Georgia. North Carolina.

Georgia, whose leaders have been crowing for about a decade now about the No. 1 state for business award from the economic development trade publication Area Development, came in 7th in CNBC’s 2025 survey, down from 4th place a year ago. North Carolina moved up from 2nd place a year ago to the top spot this year.

Georgia, in fact, lost ground from 2024 to this year in seven of the 10 categories CNBC uses to generate its annual rankings. Perhaps most notably, Georgia fell from 18th place to 30th in the Cost of Living category; from 8th to 15th in Education, and from 40th to 45th in Quality of Life. CNBC gave the Peach State a flat F in that last category.

North Carolina, meanwhile, improved its national ranking in six of the 10 categories, including Economy (from 4th in 2024 to 3rd in 2025); Infrastructure (20th to 11th); Quality of Life (32nd to 29th); Education (10th to 6th); Access to Capital (10th to 6th), and Cost of Living (31st to 23rd).

The shifts in these rankings echo my findings on what appears to be a widening divide between Georgia and North Carolina on various socioeconomic metrics. Generally, I’ve found that North Carolina has done a significantly better job over time of moving its population out of the bottom national quartile for per capita income and educational attainment. The current snapshot for premature death rates is essentially the same, although I haven’t constructed the same kind of timeline study for premature death that I have for PCI and educational attainment. I’m in the process of updating some of this data now, but my past posts can be found here, here, here and, most recently, here.

Area Development has ranked Georgia as its “Top State for Doing Business” for a decade now, including its latest rankings in 2024. But, in contrast to the CNBC rankings, Area Development’s rankings are based on 14 business and economic criteria, including such factors as “Overall Cost of Doing Business,” “Access to Qualified Labor,” and “Site Readiness Programs.” Factors like CNBC’s “Quality of Life,” “Education,” and “Cost of Living” do not appear to be in the Area Development mix.

While the CNBC report doesn’t include state-specific narratives for its rankings, it does provide general descriptions of the factors it considered in making its category rankings. For Quality of Life, for instance, it made a point of saying it considered reproductive rights based at least in part on “surveys showing a sizeable percentage of younger workers would not live in a state that bans abortion.” Both North Carolina and Georgia enacted tighter abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, but the Georgia law is significantly more restrictive. North Carolina reduced the limit for having an abortion from 20 weeks to 12 while Georgia enacted a so-called “heartbeat” law that banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and created a legal environment in which a hospital recently felt compelled to keep a braindead pregnant woman on life support until her child could be born.

You can find the CNBC package here.

Stay tuned. I’ll be back with more detail on this soon.