Where Work Pays
I have a treat for you today readers. You know I love me some maps, especially interactive ones. I recently discovered a very nifty site that serves up salary data for 320 different occupations across the country. In other words, it shows where work pays.
You might be wondering if your chosen job or profession pays significantly better in other parts of the country. And if so, if that other location has other things you desire like access to the outdoors or a big city with a thriving night life.
The great folks at the Hamilton Project have created this awesome interactive map that allows you to see where people in your profession earn the most in the USA.
When you get to the site, first choose your occupation or the closest thing related in the drop down menu. They have 320 occupations built into the tool.
Then you can choose an age group from the other pull down menu. The map will update live. Here’s an example of registered nurses between the age of 35 – 44.
Notice on the right that you can also select “top 3” and it will populate the white box with the three areas that have the highest salary.
If you have “local” selected it will show the data by major metropolitan regions, or you can select by state.
What’s really cool is that they also allow you to adjust the numbers for income taxes and the cost of living in each area.
You can also choose up to three different areas on the map to compare salaries with each other and with the national average for a specific profession.
The Data
The wage data come from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, from 2012 – 2016.
They link to a full report on the mapping site. From the report:
There are some occupations with relatively little variation in earnings across locations, but where you work has an impact on what you earn for the vast majority of jobs. Perhaps surprisingly it is not always the location with the highest overall earnings that has the highest earnings for particular occupations. For example, while San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward, California, ranks fourth out of all locations in terms of overall median earnings, it ranks below the national median for 9 percent of occupations. Conversely, locations with low overall earnings often feature higher earnings in certain lines of work. Nineteen of the lowest 20 wage locations have at least one occupation paid at the national median or better.
As I was playing around with the data I was fascinated by some of the salary data and frankly puzzled as to why some where so high or low.
For instance, I teach college as an adjunct instructor at a local University. I entered “Subject Instructors, HS/College”. Totally unexpectedly, Manchester New Hampshire ranks as the top location, paying on average $81,401.
The good news for me is that I love New England and have already considered it a top option for full retirement! So I could possibly swing a very part time gig at a college in Manchester and bank some decent coin as a way to prevent my brain from wilting away.
For all of my physician personal finance blogger friends (of which there is an entire army), the top three locations with the highest salary for physicians are:
- Springfield, Illinois
- Amarillo, Texas
- Athens-Clarke County, Georgia
$462,293 in Springfield Illinois for a physician – wow. I’m in the wrong profession….
Other Tools
In a previous post I highlighted a great tool from the Georgetown Center For Education and the Workforce. That tool shows what you can expect to earn based on your major in different parts of the country.
I’m a geographer by trade, and this is a personal finance blog. As my love affair with these two subjects continues I will seek to highlight tools, maps, data, and resources that blend the two.
I hope these two salary tools can help you if you are considering a job change or a geoarbitrage move in the near future. Also be sure to check out my Geoarbitrage Resources Page that has tons of great tools to help you find your perfect location.
Question – Would you let a higher salary be the main driver for a geoarbitrage move?
Thanks for sharing these really cool tools. I’ll definitely be spending a little time with these later. I’d love to make a geoarbitrage move away from expensive D.C. but my wife likes the amenities in the area and of course, the social network we have built. Begrudgingly, I think she makes important points….I still want to move though!
I’m hear in the DC metro area with ya. I have a love/hate relationship with it, most of the hate is related to traffic/congestion, and the COL. But it has many upsides, esp on the career front.
That’s a neat interactive map. If I was younger, this would be a factor. Why not move to a location where you can get pay more? However, I’m older now and not working full time anymore. In this case, the main driver would be a lower COL area.
Yep, in your situation obviously COL is a huge deal!
I think a lot of this has to be balanced by COL. That being said living in a high COL area usually has high incomes, and thus your % to save in real dollars may be more if the % can be constant. There is value in that.
There is a COL selector on the map so you can adjust results for that. And as the report details, salary and COL usually go hand in hand but there are many exceptions
I should have looked more carefully. Facepalm!
That map is so awesome, I wonder if you were involved in making it! What a resource, wow. I will definitely pass this one on to my nieces and nephews and the younger people I know. I have 2 brothers-in-law living in Texas and they are always trying to get the young people in the family to relocate out of the San Jose area. One thing on the map I like is the adjustment for COL and taxes. It is interesting to see how the map changes once you click on one or both of those. Pretty cool!
Was I involved…? Find out when we return from commercial break….
Ha, no I wasn’t. But looking at their other projects I’d love to get involved with the Hamilton folks!
manchester, NH isn’t bad. i helped my best friend move from there around 1990. they have an airport too. we’re trying to figure out where to go next and it has to have more characteristics like proximity to our social circles than money. the one time in my life i picked a preferred location and just went there and figured it out was the best location choice of my life….so far. we’re not moving back to NOLA any time soon, though, as our tastes and lifestyles have changed as we got older.
yep, my buddy and I used to fly in to manchester for snowboard trips to the VT and NH resorts every winter. southwest runs really low fares from dc, it’s a bargain and an easy in/out airport.
yes, social circles are a huge deal but I also would like to think I can make new friends easily even though I lean toward being an introvert
Combining this interactive map with your previous post showing how far $100 goes in each state would be a good way to find the best location.
Yep, thx Chris. I have all sorts of ideas but I lack the commensurate time.
What a neat tool. I’ve worked with this data before in graduate school to track the returns to entrepreneurship. I really enjoy sorting through huge database visualizations like this to see what I’m doing wrong with my career choices haha.
This could be a useful tool for anyone looking to upgrade their career and not married to a specific location. The invisible hand of the market should guide individuals to a point of equilibrium such that each person maximizes their satisfaction in terms of both quality of life and compensation. Firms can also use this as a check on their offers being made to candidates to make sure they’re within a reasonable, competitive range.
Excellent point about employers using this for hiring and retention. It’s got lots of value all around!
Put my data in and scored with a top 3 state rating (which I kind of knew based on your previous posts with housing costs etc).
Very cool resource. Thanks for pointing it out
Sounds like you picked a good place to live!
Very interesting! Certainly something of interest for those looking to relocate and take advantage of the maximum benefits of salary and cost of living.
Thanks!
This is super cool and very relevant as I am less than 5 years into my career. It happens that I live in one of the highest paid areas for my field of mechanical engineering when cost of living is factored in. Who Knew?! With a few exceptions of course. It looks like the oil states and Detroit area offer a fairly significant upgrade in pay, but I’ll take Minneapolis over those areas any day of the month. Thanks for sharing!
Way to go, Detroit is trying hard to recover!
Okay, this is a super cool map. I’m going to need to be very careful when I open it up because I expect to lose some real time messing around with it haha
You. Will. Lose. Time. 😉
Awesome map. Cool how you gave a low-key shout out to physician personal finance bloggers. It would be super cool if the data base broke it down to specialty. Maybe that’s too specific for the map though 🙂
Maybe if you asked them nicely 😉
That is a really informative map of how much all these professions make in practically every section of the country. I could spend almost a whole day going through that. It looks fun to look through it but I will lose time by doing it too. Haha!
It is a total time killer!
Fun tool thanks for sharing.
You’re welcome!
Thanks for doing the leg work and finding all these amazing data sets and visualizations and geek food to present to all your readers! The adjustments for taxes and COL are brilliant–and the box that shows you what you’re filtered on? These good folks know what they’re doing. Being in the midst of figuring out a career change, this map is real helpful to figure out where to go to pursue that (coincidentally, the top contender for my next career is nursing, so your example screen shot was especially delightful!). The whole chasing a higher salary in my current field is what brought me to DC in the first place, but it looks like it would be a terrible choice to pursue a nursing career here.
“geek food” love it. Can I Instragram that?
Most people in our area aren’t from here and chased the salary, as you know. Not always a bad thing but has downsides too
Instagram away! Don’t get me wrong, living in DC is great in a lot of ways, and I’m glad to be working a type of job that doesn’t exist outside of DC. But if looking to move into a profession that is possible to do anywhere, it’s time for me to build that list of places where it would be awesome to live!