Where the typical job pays most
In which jurisdiction does the median job pay the most in raw dollars, before any adjustment for what it costs to live there?
What this ranking does not measure
This is a NOMINAL wage. It is not adjusted for the cost of living, and this file holds no price-level, rent or regional-price-parity data, so the adjustment cannot be made here at all — not by me, not by the reader. A dollar in the top row and a dollar in the bottom row are not the same dollar, and this ranking cannot tell you which buys more. Four further things it does not measure. (1) It is not pay for the same job: the median moves with a jurisdiction's occupation mix, so a place concentrated in high-paying occupations outranks one concentrated in low-paying occupations even if every single occupation paid identically in both. (2) Washington, D.C. is one dense urban labour market ranked against 50 whole states, and OEWS counts jobs where the work is located, not where the worker lives — its figure is not like-for-like with a state average. (3) A median is one point: it says nothing about the spread, about who is above or below it, about hours, part-time share, benefits, or whether those jobs are growing or disappearing. (4) It is before tax and before transfers. Read it as one narrow fact — the midpoint of posted pay — and nothing more.
Highest
- 1Washington, D.C.$91,540
- 2Massachusetts$63,590
- 3Washington$62,990
- 4Alaska$61,000
- 5Colorado$59,800
- 6Connecticut$59,690
- 7New York$59,670
- 8Maryland$59,510
- 9New Jersey$58,570
- 10California$58,240
Lowest
- 47Oklahoma$45,600
- 48Louisiana$45,520
- 49West Virginia$45,300
- 50Arkansas$43,630
- 51Mississippi$40,120
All fifty-one jurisdictions carry this measure; none was excluded.
How it was computed
Read /states.json. For each of the 51 jurisdictions, take the single field states.<code>.workforce.medianWage — an integer, annual US dollars, the median across all occupations in that jurisdiction (stated provenance in the brief: BLS OEWS 2025). Sort descending. No weighting, no deflator, no derived arithmetic: the ranking IS the raw field, so any sceptic re-running `sorted(d['states'].values(), key=lambda s: -s['workforce']['medianWage'])` gets this exact order. Ties are broken alphabetically by state name; two ties exist in the file (Wisconsin and Wyoming both $50,270 at ranks 22-23; Idaho and North Carolina both $47,970 at ranks 35-36) and neither falls in the displayed top ten or bottom five. All 51 values are non-null integers, so nothing was excluded. Computed in the same pass for reference: median of the 51 values = $49,690 (Pennsylvania, rank 26); unweighted mean of the 51 = $52,271; employment-weighted mean, sum(medianWage x totalEmployment) / sum(totalEmployment) = $52,561 across 155,495,750 jobs. Spread: top ($91,540) is 2.282x bottom ($40,120); the top value sits $27,950 above second place, a gap larger than the $23,470 separating second place from last.