Salary by Metro

Published by Salary by Metro · Updated October 12, 2026

What a metro area includes

The wage covers the whole metropolitan statistical area, not the city limits of the first city in the name.

A public high school teacher standing in a classroom in the United States
A public high school classroom in the United States. Photograph by Harrison Keely. Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

The metro pages use the metropolitan statistical areas in the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics tables. Those areas follow the definitions BLS used for that release, which are the Office of Management and Budget metropolitan statistical areas from Bulletin No. 23-01. The technical notes for the release are the place to confirm the delineation, the area codes, and what the survey counts.

The name is the whole area

BLS prints the official title, and these pages keep it. Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the title in this release. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA are separate areas. Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX is the Austin-area title. Using a shorter city name would point at a different geography than the one in the wage file, so the pages do not shorten the titles.

A metropolitan statistical area is a core urban area plus the surrounding counties tied to it by commuting. The wage is for jobs in that whole area. A worker in a suburb is in the estimate. A worker outside the area is not, even if they share the city's name in ordinary speech. Employment is a count of jobs at establishments in the area, not a count of residents.

Areas that cross a state line

Some titles carry more than one state abbreviation. New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the New York area in this release. The wage is for the whole multi-state area. The comparison with a state uses the primary state on the BLS area record, which for that metro is New York. The page says when it is doing that, so a New Jersey reader does not read the New York state median as the New Jersey median. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD is handled the same way: one metro wage, and a state comparison against the primary state.

State pages are a different geography. A state estimate includes the state as BLS defines it for OEWS, which is broader than any one metro. A metro can pay more or less than its primary state because the rest of the state is in the state figure and not in the metro figure.

The largest metros, ranked by all-occupations employment in this release, start with New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ, at 9,492,000 jobs and a median annual wage of $61,430. Size is employment, not land area and not population. The highest-paying-jobs page for a metro lists detailed occupations in that same area.

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX · New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ

Questions this page answers

Does a metro wage cover only the central city?

No. It covers the metropolitan statistical area in the May 2025 OEWS tables, including the surrounding counties in the official area. The page uses the full BLS title so the geography is the one in the file.

Which state is used when a metro crosses state lines?

The wage is for the whole metro. The state comparison uses the primary state BLS assigns to the area. For New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ, that state is New York.