Philadelphia Metro GDP

What this measures — and why it matters in Philadelphia

This is the total value of goods and services produced in the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington metro area each year, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It is the broadest single number for the regional economy — the metro's entire annual output, an economy on the scale of a mid-sized country.

GDP is the denominator that keeps every other number honest. Deal volume, payrolls, permit counts, tax collections — all of them mean something only relative to the size of the economy generating them. Year-over-year growth here (in nominal dollars) tells you whether the region's pie is expanding, and comparing it against national GDP growth tells you whether Philadelphia is gaining or losing share.

Its weakness is timeliness: annual data, published with a long lag, revised for years. Nobody trades on this chart. Its value is strategic — a decade of the growth trend is the fundamental case for or against long-duration bets on the region, and the context for everything the faster series on this dashboard are telling you week to week.

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