The Best Things About Northwest Arkansas

The Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metro hit 622,177 people in the latest estimate, up from 607,433 a year earlier — roughly 40 new residents a day. I made this video to answer a question I get constantly from people watching that number: not "is it growing," but "what is it actually good at?" Here are the five things I think Northwest Arkansas does at a genuinely national level — and, a year on, where a few of my own claims needed correcting.

1. Things to do

This is the one that holds up without qualification. Northwest Arkansas was the first region in the country to be named an IMBA Regional Ride Center, and Bentonville and Fayetteville each carry their own Ride Center designation on top of that. The OZ Trails network spans more than 550 miles. The Razorback Regional Greenway runs 40 paved miles from Lake Bella Vista to Kessler Mountain Regional Park in Fayetteville. The region has hosted the Red Bull Pump Track World Championship and the UCI Cyclocross World Championships.

Add hiking, kayaking on Beaver Lake, golf, and a downtown events calendar in four cities, and the density is the real story — it is all inside a 40-minute drive, not spread across a metro the size of Dallas.

One fix from the video: I said people drive "out in Oklahoma" for rock climbing. The destination I was thinking of is Horseshoe Canyon Ranch near Jasper, which is in Arkansas, about two hours southeast of Fayetteville.

2. Career mobility

I said Northwest Arkansas is unusually good at letting people change lanes — marketing into sales, sales into customer service, customer service into HR, or into engineering and coding — and that large employers here take that bet more often than they do elsewhere. That is my read from working with relocating clients, not a statistic, and I want to label it that way.

What I can source: unemployment across the metro runs about 3.2 to 3.6 percent against a national rate near 4.1 percent. That is meaningfully tighter than the country as a whole. In the video I called it "way lower than national average," which oversells roughly a one-point gap. A tight labor market makes career pivots easier. It does not make them automatic.

3. Travel — with one real correction

XNA serves somewhere between 23 and 27 nonstop destinations depending on the season, across American, Delta, United, Southwest, Frontier, Allegiant and Breeze. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver and a long list of Florida cities are all reachable without a connection. New England is not — I listed it, and I was wrong. There are no international nonstops either; you connect through Dallas, Chicago or Denver, or drive to Tulsa, as I said in the video.

Here is the correction that matters, because you might budget around it. I said the Northwest Arkansas Council "negotiates with airports and airlines to make airfare affordable in the area." Two problems. The Council is a private 501(c)(6) business league — it has no governmental or regulatory authority and it does not negotiate fares. And XNA fares are not cheap. XNA has ranked among the most expensive airports in the country by average fare; the Council itself runs a public campaign called FareFlightNWA specifically about how high those fares are. The airport authority, not the Council, is the body that offers airlines incentives like revenue guarantees and landing-fee waivers.

Flying out of here is convenient. Assume it will cost you more than the same trip from a larger hub, and price it before you plan around it.

Driving, two of my four numbers held up and two did not. Kansas City is about three and a half hours and Tulsa about two, close to what I said. But Dallas is closer to five and a half hours than four, and the nearest Gulf beach is around 12 hours, not 10.

4. Schools and school choice — and what the funding actually looks like

I said Arkansas offers "a tax credit" for private school or homeschooling. It is not a tax credit. It is an Education Freedom Account, an education savings account created by the LEARNS Act and administered by the Arkansas Department of Education. The state deposits roughly 90 percent of per-pupil foundation funding into an account for approved expenses — $6,864 per student for 2025-26, or $7,627 for former Succeed Scholarship recipients, paid quarterly. As of the 2025-26 year the program is universal and open to all K-12 students.

That distinction is not semantic. A tax credit reduces what you owe at filing. An ESA is money deposited for you to spend on qualified expenses. If you are running the numbers on a private school here, run them against the second one.

Public school choice is real but capped: inter-district transfers are limited to a net three percent of a district's prior-year enrollment, and once a district hits that ceiling it can decline further transfers. My "they will put you where they can fit you" was directionally right and now you know the actual mechanism.

The schools I gestured at are worth naming correctly, along with one I did not mention. Haas Hall Academy is an open-enrollment public charter with campuses in Fayetteville, Bentonville, Springdale and Fort Smith. Founders Classical Academy of Northwest Arkansas, Arkansas Arts Academy in Rogers, Northwest Arkansas Classical Academy in Bentonville and Springdale's Don Tyson School of Innovation are all public charters, not private schools. Thaden School in Bentonville is the independent, tuition-based one.

5. Community

The reason this works is arithmetic more than culture. The metro has grown about 41 percent since 2010 and added more than 50,000 residents since 2020. The University of Arkansas enrolled a record 34,175 students last fall, with out-of-state students making up a bit over half the student body. Walmart, Tyson and J.B. Hunt have been relocating people into Benton and Washington counties for decades.

When that much of a place arrived recently, newcomers are not an intrusion on an established order — they are most of the order. That is why the first Fridays, the farmers markets and the parades feel open rather than closed. It is easier to join something that is still being built.

If you want the honest version of all five: things to do and community are the strongest claims on this list, career mobility is a real pattern I would not put a number on, and travel and school funding both work differently than I described a year ago.