Call-Center Industry Jobs Since ChatGPT: 37 US Hubs and 37 States Ranked

Methodology

• Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), open-data files downloaded on October 13 and 14, 2026. QCEW counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance, as reported by employers, by county and industry.
• Industry: NAICS 56142, telephone call centers, private employers. It covers telephone answering services (561421) and telemarketing bureaus and other contact centers (561422): outsourced call-center firms and stand-alone contact-center operations. In-house customer service teams at banks, insurers, airlines and telecom firms are usually counted in those firms' own industries.
• Periods: The main measure compares annual average call-center industry jobs in 2022 with 2025. ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, so 11 months of 2022 came before launch. We use annual averages for places because they smooth the one-month steps that move monthly counts. As a result, places that were already falling during 2022 tend to show a bigger fall on annual averages than from November 2022 to November 2025. Utah, for example, fell 41.5% on annual averages and 34.3% from November 2022 to November 2025. The national figure from launch compares November 2022 with November 2025. Monthly counts run from January 2022 to March 2026 and are not seasonally adjusted. The national series runs from 2014. The 2019 to 2022 columns use the same method on 2019 and 2022 annual averages.
• Places: Counties are as published. Metro hubs are 2023 federal metro areas, built by adding up their counties. A metro's change is measured only on counties BLS shows in both 2022 and 2025. We rank metros with at least 2,000 call-center industry jobs in 2022 where those counties hold at least 90% of the metro's call-center industry jobs that BLS shows (37 hubs). The big-hub list uses a 5,000-job floor (13 hubs). Counties and states use a 2,000-job floor (38 counties that BLS shows in both 2022 and 2025; 37 states, with Puerto Rico shown for reference). A county missing from a BLS file has no call-center workplaces that year and counts as zero. County and metro figures leave out the jobs BLS records with no fixed county, often statewide remote staff. State and national figures include them. In the states where BLS shows them in both years, those records held 61,733 call-center industry jobs in 2022 and 61,087 in 2025, so in those states the county falls are not a move of staff into that category.
• Coverage: Our 2022 county sum compared with BLS's own metro total. Full is 95% or more, Partial is below 95%, and Unchecked means BLS published no metro total. Albuquerque and Portland are checked against BLS's 2023 metro total.
• Calculations: Change and percentage change in annual average call-center industry jobs. Per 1,000 figures divide by all private jobs in the same area and year; the loss per 1,000 divides the 2022 to 2025 fall by all private jobs in 2022. The biggest one-month fall is the largest drop from one month to the next between February 2022 and December 2025, divided by the 2022 to 2025 fall. A share of 30% or more is flagged. For metros, per 1,000 figures divide by all private jobs in all of the metro's counties, so they read low for partial metros, most of all Richmond (43% coverage).
• Workplace sizes: QCEW size classes for the first quarter of 2016, 2022, 2025 and 2026 (2026 figures are preliminary), which count reporting units by March headcount.
• January 2024 check: Removing the January 2024 drop in the five counties (8,781 call-center industry jobs) from every later month changes these results. The national fall from November 2022 to November 2025 becomes 97,125 (22.1%) instead of 105,906 (24.1%), and the fall in annual averages from 2022 to 2025 becomes 106,958 (24.1%) instead of 115,739 (26.1%). San Antonio falls 36.7% instead of 58.1%, Phoenix 26.0% instead of 37.5% and Dallas-Fort Worth 5.9% instead of 29.8%. Houston rises 13.7% instead of falling 11.8%. Arizona falls 28.2% instead of 35.6%, Texas 11.0% instead of 20.7% and Georgia 10.2% instead of 13.5%. On the 13-hub list, Albuquerque then ranks first. Apart from the metros named here, no metro moves more than two places. This is a sensitivity check, not a correction, and the tables show the published figures.
• Data vintage: Figures use QCEW data published by October 14, 2026. BLS revises QCEW each quarter, and second-quarter 2026 data, scheduled for December 2, 2026, is not included. BLS's monthly payroll survey (Current Employment Statistics) shows a similar fall for telephone call centers: 436,100 jobs in November 2022 and 329,400 in November 2025, down 24.5% (not seasonally adjusted).