Payscale
(Payscale Graphic)

It might be chilly in Seattle this week, but a new interactive “heat map” from the folks at Payscale shows just how hot the region was in 2017 when it came to employee pay compared to the rest of the country.

The Seattle-based compensation software and data provider offers details in a new report on how location affects pay county by county. Metropolitan areas — and tech hubs — such as Seattle, San Francisco and Boston stand out as blue areas on the map.

Payscale said that after controlling for the effects of experience, industry, education, and management responsibilities, the map pinpoints where people stand to earn the most when they relocate — and bring their education and skills with them. On the Payscale site, you can click into the map and see percentages by which various counties differ from Dakota County, Neb., which served as “Everytown, USA” for the study.

Payscale said the same worker would earn 48.4 percent more in King County, Wash., than she would in Dakota County, Neb.

In Santa Clara County, Calif., home to Silicon Valley, that number is 71.2 percent.

The map also illustrates the effects of the oil, gas, and mining industries and how people do well because of that in northern Alaska, the Bakken shale play in western North Dakota and Eastern Montana, the Permian basin in West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico and mining communities in northern Nevada.

Lighter yellow stretches inland from the mid-Atlantic seaboard and continues into the South and the Heartland, where for a variety of historical and demographic and geographical reasons, wages are below average.

PayScale’s chief economist Katie Bardaro also took a look ahead to 2018 to identify five trends that will drive pay in the coming year: higher and more frequent bonuses; tighter talent market for hot jobs; addressing the gender gap; loss of healthcare jobs; and artificial intelligence. Read the Payscale report for Bardaro’s thinking behind each of those trends.

Payscale methodology: The maps were made using 5.1 million profiles from the PayScale salary database collected from 2007 to 2017. We control for the effects of education, industry, experience, management status, and counties over time. “How Location Affects Pay” shows the county-level change in pay conditional on those other factors, using Dakota County, Neb., as the base case as it has the median county effect.

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