North Dakota rode a boom to the top. Now it has to build what’s next.

For nearly three decades, almost no state’s economy grew faster than North Dakota’s.

From 1998 to 2025, North Dakota’s real GDP more than quadrupled, expanding about 421%, according to federal Bureau of Economic Analysis data. That’s second only to Utah (452%) and ahead of every other state, including Texas (380%). The nation as a whole grew 260%.

In large part because of the Bakken shale oil boom, one of the nation’s smallest economies turned into one of its fastest-climbing. Then it stopped climbing. In 2025, North Dakota’s economy grew less than 1% — near the bottom in a year when most states’ economies grew 3% to 6%.

That gap, between a remarkable recent past and a flat present, is the conundrum facing Rich Garman, director of economic development and finance at the North Dakota Department of Commerce.

“Our biggest bet is on North Dakota itself,” Garman told me on a recent episode of Builders Live. “We don’t really want to try to reinvent ourselves.”

Instead, he describes climbing the value chain on what the state already leads in — energy, agriculture and the industrial base around them. “Our next economic chapter isn’t about producing more commodities,” he said. “It’s about creating more value for those commodities.”

The logic is retention. “Every dollar of value I can add to a bushel of grain or a gallon of oil or a megawatt of electricity, that’s value added that stays here in North Dakota,” Garman said. That’s more valuable than letting the commodities flow elsewhere to be refined, manufactured or profited from. In practice it means advanced manufacturing, value-added ag, energy technologies, autonomous systems and defense.

What’s newer is where entrepreneurship sits in that plan.

For much of the 2010s, startups were economic development’s shiny side project, getting much less attention than recruiting big employers. That has changed. Garman now puts founders at the table alongside the state’s research assets, from NDSU’s agricultural science and UND’s drone work to the Grand Sky UAS park, the Grand Farm autonomy site and the NSF-backed AgTech Engine. 

“They have a place at the table,” Garman said of startups, “and several of them go on to be taxpaying entities.”

His pitch for why it can work here is counterintuitive: smallness is speed. With 800,000 residents, “the chain of command is shorter” — a regulator or economic developer is a phone call away. “Some people might say we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Garman said. “I like to say we’re in the center of everywhere.”

The lead North Dakota built is real. So is the plateau. The test now is whether a state that extracted its way to the top of the growth charts can manufacture its next chapter instead.