Where U.S. Wages Go The Furthest
America’s most lucrative salaries are on offer in Silicon Valley, but considering the region’s notoriously high cost of living, do wages there really go that far? Pew Research shed some light on the real value of salaries in America’s tech-hub, as well as further afield by analyzing weekly wages after an adjustment for cost-of-living. Pew used regional price parities to conduct their analysis, finding that wages in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (which covers Silicon Valley) have the strongest purchasing power of any U.S. metro. Its average weekly wages in the third quarter of 2015 amounted to $1,706, a significant distance ahead of second placed California-Lexington Park’s (Maryland) $1,277. Pew point out that high regional price levels can erode the real value of wages with low prices offsetting low wages to a certain extent. They use Beckley in West Virginia as an example. Weekly average wages there are among the lowest in the nation at $707 but due to its low cost of living, its adjusted weekly average wage is 28 percent higher than the actual average wage. Read more at Forbes.
