Top 10 US Metros by Wage Score Relative to Cost Score
PlainCompare cross-cut measuring wage-to-cost spread across US metros, a measure of metro economic accessibility derived from BLS wages and BEA price parities.
Research period:
Research question
Among US metros with both wage and cost scoring, which deliver the most favorable wage-to-cost spread, and how does this spread vary across regions?
Methodology
This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.
Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.
Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.
Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.
Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.
Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.
See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.
Top 10 US Metros by Wage Score Relative to Cost Score
Live data: reflects the current dataset
The ranked top 10
Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.
| # | Metro | Wage-cost spread | Wages | Cost | Composite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 99.741 | 99.741 | 0 | 39.5 |
| 2 | New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 98.446 | 99.223 | 0.777 | 35.1 |
| 3 | Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 97.927 | 99.482 | 1.554 | 44.2 |
| 4 | San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 97.668 | 100 | 2.332 | 40 |
| 5 | Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 97.15 | 97.668 | 0.518 | 37.4 |
| 6 | Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 95.337 | 98.964 | 3.627 | 46.1 |
| 7 | San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 95.078 | 96.373 | 1.295 | 39 |
| 8 | Vallejo, CA | 94.301 | 98.705 | 4.404 | 41.9 |
| 9 | Napa, CA | 94.041 | 95.078 | 1.036 | 37.6 |
| 10 | Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 93.523 | 98.187 | 4.663 | 30 |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and BEA, BLS Occupational Employment Wage Statistics combined with BEA Regional Price Parities and HUD FMR. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and BEA, BLS Occupational Employment Wage Statistics combined with BEA Regional Price Parities and HUD FMR. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA, with a value of 99.741 on the Wage-cost spread column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the source agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record (99.741) and the 10th-ranked record (93.523) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and BEA, specifically the BLS Occupational Employment Wage Statistics combined with BEA Regional Price Parities and HUD FMR. PlainCompare ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Wage-to-cost spread sub-scores are PlainCompare-normalized scores on a fixed scale, not raw BLS dollar wages or raw BEA RPP price indices. The spread metric assumes wages and cost are measured on the same numeric scale after normalization; a positive spread does not directly translate to a specific household-budget surplus. BLS OES wages reflect mean occupational wages aggregated across the metro and do not capture the household income distribution shape, which differs materially across metros, a high-wage metro with extreme income inequality and a high-wage metro with a compressed wage distribution score identically on the wages component. BEA RPP captures the relative cost of a representative basket and does not capture cost variation within the metro (downtown vs suburb vs exurban). Wage data lags the cost-of-living index by approximately one year due to different release cadences; cross-metro spread comparisons assume both columns reflect a comparable vintage window. Rent score derives from HUD Fair Market Rent which uses 5-year ACS data and may lag actual rental market conditions especially in fast-moving rental markets.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 metros by rent-affordability sub-score (HUD Fair Market Rent data)
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics - https://www.bls.gov/oes/
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities - https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fair Market Rents - https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr.html