National wages were up 0.5 percent year-over-year during Q1 of 2014 and Seattle saw the second-highest wage growth of any city in the nation last quarter, according to a new report from PayScale.
Seattle-based salary data company PayScale, which conducts quarterly studies on compensation across U.S. cities and industries, found that Seattle wages increased by 1.6 percent from this time last year, marking the second-highest growth in the U.S. Minneapolis-St. Paul topped the list with a 1.9 percent increase.
Wages in the IT sector increased nationally by 1.1 percent in Q1 2014, while science and biotech jobs had the best annual growth of any sector at 2.3 percent. PayScale also noted that healthcare has surpassed engineering for jobs with the most pay growth since 2006, at an increase of 10.3 percent.
Katie Bardaro, lead economist at PayScale, offered some analysis:
Our results show the economy is on a steady, but very tepid recovery with wage growth rising at a slow rate. We anticipate the trend of sluggish overall wage growth to continue in 2014 with a few industries such as science, biotech, and healthcare showing periodic gains that are more significant. The Q1 Index also reveals that nominal wage growth is not enough to outpace increases in the costs of goods and services. In fact, real wages have dropped almost 8 percent since 2006 which means most people can buy less than they could eight years ago.
In addition, wages for small companies rose 0.3 percent in Q1 2014, but fell by 0.4 percent for medium companies and 0.3 percent for large companies.
Payscale predicts a national wage growth of 0.8 percent for next quarter. See the full report here.
