DALLAS (MarketWatch) — People in the Dallas–Fort Worth area are quick to note it takes less than five minutes for Texas’s biggest metropolis to add a new resident. But that’s not the scary part.

What’s really troubling, at least for other U.S. cities competing for businesses and commerce against what locals here call “DFW,” is how area residents smile when they say it. That same frantic growth rate could be maintained for decades before the nation’s fourth most populous metropolitan area would begin to feel cramped.

“There’s more activity today than I’ve seen in 30 years in this business,” said a beaming Toby Grove, president of KDC, a local real-estate developer that is currently building several corporate offices in the region.

Though the DFW metro area covers an area roughly the size of New Hampshire, there still are hundreds of pockets of empty space between Fort Worth on the west and Dallas on the east, offering plenty of room for growth. Once those are filled, the region could simply keep expanding outward, in all directions.

Drive the region’s elaborate web of new and relatively uncrowded highways — seemingly ready to accommodate an onslaught of humanity — and you’ll see the occasional 10- or 20-story office building or hotel dotting the landscape, quickly followed by acres and acres of vacant land. Locals are upbeat when they say the area’s 6.8 million residents could double over the next 20 years.

“Growth seems to be more enhanced here,” Grove said. “I don’t see any slowdown.”

Indeed, the area has become a promised land of sorts to which businesses are flocking — and, once there, thriving. Think of just about any U.S. company, and there’s a good chance it’s got operations of some kind in the area.

Some companies seek a geographic advantage by locating facilities in the middle of the country, whether a distribution hub or an entire headquarters. It may be that executives are hankering to save money on taxes or real estate or other business costs. Or perhaps they’re just weary of regulatory trappings elsewhere and long for a meaningful relationship with a business-friendly local government.

It doesn’t matter. They’re getting all that and more. And it’s what led MarketWatch to declare that Dallas–Fort Worth is America’s most business-friendly metro area for 2014.

To reach this decision, MarketWatch looked at the 100 most populous urban centers in the U.S. and ranked them against each other using 23 different sets of statistics. The study rated regions via such metrics as the growth in a local labor force, how well publicly traded companies have been able to improve profits, the securing of patents and even the maintenance of local “vitality.”

We took relevant data from any reliable source that could break it out by metro area, from Moody’s Analytics to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to Nasdaq. Then we ranked each city against the other 99 in these 23 categories, put all the scores on an Excel spreadsheet, and pressed a few buttons to see which came out on top.

When all was said and done, Dallas had the highest collective score, just ahead of San Francisco, Seattle and Des Moines, Iowa. See the rest of the top 10 here.

Once the numbers pointed to a winner, we set out for North Texas to see firsthand what made Dallas so wonderful for business. Dallas had been a strong performer in previous MarketWatch studies, frequently finishing in or near the top 10, but this was the first time it clinched the top spot.

We discovered Dallas’s present-day numbers may well pale in comparison to its future stats. Little, it seems, is standing in its way.

Light rail ferries passengers to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Russ Britt/MarketWatch

Dallas’s transportation infrastructure already boasts 37 interstate highways and toll roads to handle a potential crush, plus a light-rail system that snakes throughout the region. It seems the city fathers are preparing for Los Angeles–style sprawl but are determined to avoid L.A.’s mistakes.

And don’t look for Texas regulators to put up roadblocks; these days they’re more facilitators than enforcers, geared more toward growth than limitations. See the bottom 10 cities here.

Asked if there were any plans to someday curb or control growth, J. Hammond Perot, assistant director in the city of Dallas’s office of economic development, laughed. “Not in Texas,” he said, adding that the priority for the city is to keep it financially vibrant.

He then invoked a more polite version of the mantra made famous during Bill Clinton’s presidential run in 1992: “It’s the Economy with a Big ‘E,’ not a little ‘e.’ ”

Fort Worth is much the same. The question for many city planners is not whether they want a business to come to town; it’s whether the municipality can provide tax breaks. That’s not always a slam dunk, but even without tax incentives companies are flocking to the region because the business environment and growth potential are so inviting.

When asked how big Fort Worth wants to be, Michael Hennig, a business and community development coordinator with the city, shrugged and said: “Bigger. But not so big we lose the small-town identity.”

A small portion of the Toyota employees headed for Dallas. Russ Britt/MarketWatch

Call it a Texas cliché, but that bigger-is-better mentality is real here, particularly in the corporate sphere. Land parcels are larger, and businesses themselves can be huge. Take a look in a typical office building and you’ll see rooms housing massive “cube farms” that test long-distance vision and echo controls.

The same is true in heavy industry. Fort Worth, in fact, boasts a factory floor that’s a mile long — actually more than that, by about 25 feet, at city fathers’ insistence. Now the site of Lockheed Martin’s LMT, -0.20% F-35 fighter plant, it was constructed in the 1940s as one of a handful of massive factories to push out World War II bombers. But Amon Carter, a renowned civic booster at the time, insisted that Fort Worth’s factory be slightly larger than the others — hence the 25 extra feet.

More importantly, Lockheed’s plant serves as an example of how the region treats established businesses, not just new ones. A number of cities surrounding the airfield where the F-35s are tested have banded together to make sure adjacent properties aren’t used for anything incompatible with what’s already there, according to Jay Chapa, the city’s economic development director.

Yet the region is trying to bring corporations in as fast as possible, and it’s getting hard to keep track of all the companies that now have local operations there.

In suburban Plano, north of Dallas, is a commercial park that already houses J.C. Penney Co.’s US:JCP corporate headquarters and will soon include spacious facilities for FedEx Corp. FDX, -0.53% .

Parcel in Plano where Toyota is moving its North American headquarters. Russ Britt/MarketWatch

Nearby, Japanese automotive giant Toyota Motor Corp. TM, -0.55% has plunked down money for an expansive 100-acre campus where it plans to consolidate three critical North American offices and 4,000 jobs. It was one of 100 cities the Japanese car manufacturer considered when contemplating the move.

“North Texas kept coming back to us,” said Steven Curtis, Toyota spokesman.

It’s a huge parcel near a freeway where it seems space will be the least of the company’s concerns. Instead, Toyota has said its toughest task may be to sell its workers on the idea of making the move over the next few years. Included among those they’re trying to convince are 3,000 employees at the company’s current North America headquarters in suburban Los Angeles. See slide show on other winners and losers.

The company has stated that it wants to bring as many workers as it can from there, as well as from facilities in Kentucky and New York. Over the past year, it’s offered to fly out anyone who wants to poke around. One incentive: Many will find there’s a good chance their Texas living spaces will be triple the size of their current homes.

“Our hope is they will make the move with us,” Curtis said.

Privately held State Farm Insurance Co. has professed the same sentiment, though its strategy is to keep its workers close to the office. To State Farm, the way to retain its young talent is to offer what it calls a “live/work/play” urban environment.

It’s consolidating a lot of its claims-adjustment and other operations from scattered facilities throughout the U.S. into hubs in Phoenix, Atlanta and the Dallas suburb of Richardson. Its home office remains in the central Illinois town of Bloomington.

Apartments go up next to State Farm offices in Richardson complex. Russ Britt/MarketWatch

Roughly 8,000 of State Farm’s employees will work in 1 million square feet of office space on a 200-acre parcel in Richardson. KDC, State Farm’s building contractor, also is constructing several apartment complexes at the site, with retail and entertainment on the first floor of each.

The idea is to create a virtual, self-contained city where State Farm workers can reside within a stone’s throw of the office, surrounded by a pseudo-urban environment. Like Toyota, State Farm is trying to keep many of the people who would be uprooted by the move.

“Our workforce desires this kind of environment,” said Victor Terry, vice president of State Farm’s south-central market area.

Other businesses, including defense contractor Raytheon Corp. US:RTN , will occupy a small portion of the State Farm parcel.

The project is known as City Line, according to Grove, the KDC president. “One of the reasons we named it ‘City Line’ is it’s an instant city,” he said. “It’s an urban environment in a suburban location.”

Still, there’s plenty of space in the metro region for those seeking suburban escapes.

Karen Abram is a supervisor at the burgeoning mortgage lender PennyMac Financial Services PFSI, +2.48% in Fort Worth. She migrated to the region with her husband and three sons from the Los Angeles area a decade ago, when she worked for the now-defunct Countrywide Financial Services.

She took a brief hiatus several years ago and returned to the working world recently with PennyMac, which itself is based near her old Southern California stomping grounds.

Karen Abram, a California transplant, at PennyMac offices in Fort Worth. Russ Britt/MarketWatch

Abram has few complaints, if any, about the region. She and her family had been packed into a small home east of downtown Los Angeles with all three boys sharing a bedroom. Now they’ve got a 5,800-square-foot house in suburban Frisco, Texas, with a swimming pool and plenty of room for everyone.

“Life is wonderful,” she said.

There’s so much room for Abram and her family, in fact, that they’re looking to downsize as the boys leave home. But they want to remain in the region.

That’s because PennyMac is just starting to stake roots in Fort Worth. The company was born of the 2008 financial crisis and has been growing at a rapid clip in the years since. It plans to keep its headquarters in California but chose Fort Worth when it decided two years ago that it was time for a major expansion.

PennyMac now has 1,800 employees, 470 of them in the Fort Worth office, and it’s planning to add about 400 more in that Texas facility within the next year. Steve Bailey, PennyMac’s chief operations officer, said he’d been eyeing the region for expansion for several years.

“We were very confident in the infrastructure and the ability to handle growth,” Bailey said.