New Mexico: Among Worst States for Business and Falling Fast

The Rio Grande Foundation is always on the lookout for interesting ways of ranking the State among the 50 US states when it comes to the economy, education system, and other social metrics. Sometimes we disagree with the measuring stick used, but we always look to explain the issue with each rating.

To that end CNBC recently published its “Best States for Business” Rankings for 2025. Not surprisingly the index ranked us 44th. Variables included (with New Mexico’s ranking in parentheses): Economy (46th), Infrastructure (29th), Workforce (31st), Cost of Doing Business (23rd), Business Friendliness (39th), Quality of Life (33rd), and Technology and Innovation (35th). New Mexico’s best ranking was 23rd for Cost of Doing Business and 46th on Economy. Check out the screen shot below.

But, this is a report that has been published for many years. We were curious what New Mexico’s performance looked like over time. So, we went back a decade to the 2015 version of the same report. This would be during the Susana Martinez Administration. The results were shocking. The categories then (along with New Mexico’s rankings) were Workforce (16th), Cost of Doing Business (23rd), Infrastructure (5th), Economy (24th), Quality of Life (24), and Technology Innovation (38th).

So, if you’re keeping score at home, in addition to dropping from 24th to 44th overall, we dropped from 24th to 46th on the Economy, Infrastructure fell from 5th to 29th, and Quality of life went from 24th to 33rd. Needless to say, things have gone in the wrong direction in this report over the last decade of MLG’s term and a more “progressive” Legislature.