Charlotte Tops 2025 Power City Index, Beating Silicon Valley and Washington

CHICAGO – Charlotte, North Carolina closed 2025 as the best-performing U.S. metro area in CNBC’s annual Power City Index, edging out Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. with a median stock return of just above 22%.

How the ranking works

The Power City Index (PCI) was created a decade ago to gauge stock-market performance by metropolitan area. Each of the 36 indexes contains the 11 or 12 publicly traded companies with the largest market capitalizations headquartered in that city or region. All stocks are equally weighted, and the median return is tracked through FactSet from the first to the final trading day of the year. If a constituent is acquired, it remains in the basket until delisting, at which point the next-largest company by market value joins the lineup.

Headquarters location, determined through an S&P Capital IQ screen, is the sole geographic criterion—regardless of where a company’s workforce is concentrated. The method offers a snapshot of how regional corporate clusters fare in the equity market over 12 months.

Charlotte’s broad-based climb

Unlike past PCI winners that relied on one extraordinary outlier, Charlotte advanced on the strength of several double-digit movers across lithium, industrials, banking and packaging. Seven of its 12 components gained more than 20%:

• Albemarle (ALB) +64%
• Curtiss-Wright (CW) +57%
• Nucor (NUE) +40%
• Bank of America (BAC) +25%
• Coca-Cola Consolidated (COKE) +23%
• Sealed Air (SEE) +23%
• Truist (TFC) +14%

Utility Duke Energy (DUK) added 9%, while Lowe’s (LOW) fell 2%, Honeywell (HON) slipped 8% and Ingersoll Rand (IR) declined 12%. Even with those laggards, the median result remained the strongest of any PCI for 2025, illustrating Charlotte’s diversified corporate base and the unexpected market momentum of lithium mining and specialty steel compared with the year’s highly publicized artificial-intelligence trade.

Silicon Valley settles for second place

Investors heavily exposed to northern California enjoyed a solid year—just not a chart-topping one. The Silicon Valley PCI delivered a 21%-plus median return, paced by software platform AppLovin (APP) at 112%. Alphabet (GOOGL) rose 66%, Applied Materials (AMAT) climbed 60%, Broadcom (AVGO) advanced 50% and Nvidia (NVDA) gained 41%.

Positive showings from Cisco (CSCO) at 31%, Meta (META) at 13%, Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) at 9%, Apple (AAPL) at 9%, Intuit (INTU) at 6% and Netflix (NFLX) at 6% were partly offset by a 28% slide in ServiceNow (NOW). Without that single drag, the Valley might have overtaken Charlotte.

Defense lifts Washington to third

The Washington, D.C. metropolitan area finished third with an approximate 17% median gain. Defense contractors—many of which relocated headquarters to Northern Virginia in recent years—provided the bulk of the lift. Top performers included:

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• RTX (RTX) +59%
• General Dynamics (GD) +28%
• Northrop Grumman (NOC) +22%
• Boeing (BA) +23%

Capital One (COF) rose 37% and water-technology specialist Xylem (XYL) added 18%. Marriott (MAR) and Hilton (HLT) notched smaller advances, while Danaher (DHR) and Lockheed Martin (LMT) ended roughly flat. AvalonBay (AVB) fell 17% and MicroStrategy (MSTR) dropped 47%, but the defense cluster’s gains outweighed the weakness elsewhere.

The other end of the spectrum: Dallas disappoints

While most regions recorded positive returns, Dallas ranked last with a negative 10% median performance. Specific company numbers were not provided, yet the aggregate result underlines how regional concentration in certain sectors can weigh on an index during a challenging period.

Key takeaways for 2025

• Charlotte’s win underscores renewed investor interest in industrial materials such as lithium and steel.
• The technology-heavy Silicon Valley group performed well but could not overcome a sharp decline in one major software constituent.
• Proximity to the Pentagon benefited defense-oriented firms in the Washington area.
• Geographic diversification remains evident: the top three metros represent the Southeast, West Coast and Mid-Atlantic.

The Power City Indexes are primarily a snapshot rather than an investable product, yet their annual results provide a yardstick for how clusters of headquarters influence regional market narratives. CNBC plans to continue monitoring the 36 metros in 2026, offering a city-by-city lens on corporate performance across the United States.

Crédito da imagem: Sean Pavone | iStock | Getty Images