| Sumario: | This article presents calculations of the pay in metropolitan areas relative to that in the U.S., as a whole, which take account of both inter-area differences in the composition of jobs and the fact that surveys occur at different times of the year. Pay relatives are presented for all jobs that are covered by the survey and by nine major occupation groups. The calculations show that pay is highest in San Francisco, California whose index of 118 indicates that pay is 18 percent higher than it is for the Nation as a whole, and lowest in Brownsville, Texas, which has an index of 84, 16 percent lower than that for the nation. In addition, the calculations show that, generally, an area that is high paying for one major occupation group is high paying for others. However, there are exceptions to this statement. Overall, the results suggest that it can be misleading to measure inter-area pay differentials with mean hourly wage levels by area that do not control for the fact that the characteristics of jobs differ from one area to the next.
|
|---|