US Metro Occupation-Median Benchmarks, With a Price-Level Adjustment

Equal-weighted means of published occupation medians for US metropolitan areas, shown before and after division by BEA Regional Price Parities.

Research period:

Compiled by WageDex on 2026-07-29

Research question

Which US metro areas have the highest average of published occupation medians, and how does that derived ranking change after applying BEA Regional Price Parities?

Methodology

For each metropolitan area, this page takes the equal-weighted mean of every reported occupation median (a_median). Areas labelled nonmetropolitan by BLS are excluded, and the 100-occupation threshold is an editorial scope filter rather than a reliability guarantee.

The second calculation divides that derived benchmark by the area's BEA Regional Price Parity (rpp_all / 100). The result is a standardized national-price-equivalent benchmark. It does not model an individual's expenses or turn the occupation-level construction into a worker wage statistic.

See the methodology page for the complete data-update process, OEWS and BEA source vintages, and field definitions.

Key findings

  • San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA has the highest equal-weighted occupation-median benchmark in this analysis at $98,655, 1.52× the $65,037 average across 393 metro benchmarks.
  • San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA leads after the BEA price-level adjustment at $89,343 in national-price-equivalent benchmark dollars, using a Regional Price Parity of 110.4.
  • The top ten nominal metro benchmarks span $81,730 to $98,655, a $16,925 difference between tenth and first place.
  • 4 of the 10 metros in the nominal ranking also appear in the price-level-adjusted top 10; 6 nominal leaders fall outside the adjusted list.
  • San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA's nominal benchmark averages 574 published occupation medians; occupations with suppressed medians are excluded rather than treated as zero.

Metro areas by equal-weighted occupation medians

Mean of published occupation medians; each reported occupation counts once

mean of occupation medians
Source U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS As of May 2025

The top ten derived metro benchmarks

Rendered live from the 10-row result of the metro wage query in the page frontmatter.

# Metro area Mean of occupation medians Occupations
1 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA $98,655 574
2 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA $95,708 687
3 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA $92,550 691
4 New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ $87,148 757
5 Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH $83,802 686
6 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV $82,744 704
7 Boulder, CO $82,291 412
8 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA $82,276 737
9 Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury, CT $81,827 484
10 San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA $81,730 671

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS metropolitan wage estimates; U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities. Queried live from the WageDex database snapshot at request time.

Findings

Top nominal benchmark

The highest nominal result belongs to San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA, at about $98,655 across 574 reported occupations. The equal-area mean across 393 metropolitan areas is roughly $65,037. Both are equal-weighted occupation-median benchmarks, not worker wage statistics.

RPP division changes the ordering

After division by RPP, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA has the highest national-price-equivalent benchmark at about $89,343. The secondary chart records the observed reordering; it does not explain its causes or estimate individual purchasing power.

What the comparison supports

The comparison supports two observations: the nominal equal-weighted benchmark differs across metros, and applying the published all-items RPP changes the ordering. It does not identify which price components or labor-market factors caused those differences.

Why this ranking matters

Showing both columns makes the transformation auditable: readers can see the occupation-median benchmark and how division by the area-wide price index reorders it. The linked metro profiles provide occupation-level values for a more specific comparison.

What this analysis cannot tell us

Two federal sources are combined here. Each reported occupation median receives equal weight regardless of employment, so neither result is a worker mean or median. The RPP division produces national-price-equivalent benchmark dollars, not an estimate of any individual's purchasing power. Suppressed occupations are excluded, coverage differs by area, and RPP is a metro-wide price index published on a different schedule from OEWS.

Metro benchmarks after RPP division

Equal-weighted occupation-median benchmark divided by BEA RPP (100 = national average)

national-price-equivalent benchmark
Source BLS OEWS and BEA Regional Price Parities As of 2024

Related data

Sources