Best Job Markets for Raking It In, Avoiding Envy, or Sleeping Late

Labor Day is as good a time as any to remember that looking for a home and looking for a job often go hand-in-hand. The top reason why people move to another state is for a new job or job transfer. In fact, 40% of cross-state moves in 2012 were for a new job, a job transfer, or to look for work, according to the Census. (But just 3% of within-county moves were for these employment-related reasons.) Of course, if you want to work in a highly clustered industry, you go where those jobs are: move to Los Angeles to make movies, Providence, RI to make costume jewelry, or Dalton, GA to make carpets. But if industry clusters, family, or other reasons don’t tie you to a particular city, there are lots of reasons to pick one job market over another.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Census data (see note at end), we looked at how the 100 largest U.S. metros stack up on five job-market measures: lowest unemployment, highest earnings, least inequality, women’s share of earnings, and when people leave for work in the morning. We can’t promise you can have it all, but here are five strategies for picking the best job market for you.

Strategy #1: Where Unemployment is Lowest

If you need a job right now, go where the job market is tight. Low unemployment means relatively few people are actively looking for work. To put it in housing terms, low unemployment means a “seller’s market” – good for those looking to sell their labor (i.e. people), not so good for those looking to buy labor (i.e. companies and other employers).

As of July 2013, according to this morning’s BLS data release, unemployment is 4.2% in Honolulu, lowest among the 100 largest metros. Most of the lowest-unemployment markets are in the center of the country (Omaha, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis-St. Paul) or out West (Salt Lake City, Seattle). But California has some of the worst unemployment problems: four of the five metros with double-digit unemployment are in California, including Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino, Bakersfield, and Fresno – where unemployment is 12.5%.

Strategy #2: Where Earnings are Highest

If all you cared about was raking it in, where would you go? Across the country, earnings vary hugely, even for people with similar education, age, and occupation. Using raw Census data and adjusting for these demographic and economic differences, we found that earnings are highest in San Jose, where the typical worker can expect to earn 34% more than the national average for someone with similar background, skills, and experiences. All of the top 10 metros for earnings are in the Bay Area or along the Northeast corridor of Boston, New York, and Washington.

Of course, housing costs more in these markets, too. If you’re looking to spend as little of your income on housing as possible, look to where housing is cheap, not where earnings are high, such as Detroit, Houston, and Atlanta.

Strategy #3: Where the Gap between the Haves and Have-nots is Smallest

Looking to avoid the envy of your neighbors – or avoid envying them? Then move to where inequality isn’t quite as stark. To measure this, we looked at the ratio between earnings at the 90^th percentile (that is, someone who is just at the bottom of the top 10%) and at the 10^th percentile (someone who is just at the top of the bottom 10%). The smaller the ratio, the less unequal earnings are.

Springfield, MA, Toledo, OH, and Buffalo, NY, have least unequal earnings in the country: workers at the 90^th percentile earn about 4 times as much as those at the 10^th percentile. None of the 10 most equal metros are huge: they are all mid-size metros in all regions of the country.

The most unequal metro – could you guess? – is New York, where the 90/10 ratio is 6.7, followed by Los Angeles and San Jose. Many of the most unequal metros also have the highest earnings premium (see above), so the inequality is more about the rich being especially rich rather than the poor being especially poor. However, three metros – Los Angeles, Houston, and Bakersfield, CA – are among the most unequal metros without particularly high wages overall.

Strategy #4: Where Women Bring Home the Bacon

Women are less likely to work than men, and working women earn less than men on average – even after taking education, occupation, and other background factors into account. As a result, women take home much less than half of all the money earned in the U.S.

So where should you go if you if you value equal pay between the genders? Women come closest to earning half in Sacramento, Springfield, MA, New Haven, CT, and Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick, MD, where they earn 41% of all workplace income. At the other extreme, just 31% of aggregate local earnings go to women in Salt Lake City, followed by 33% in San Jose and 34% in Houston.

Strategy #5: Where You Can Sleep In

Maybe you don’t care about your own earnings or whether the have-nots are doing alright. If all you care about is getting a little extra sleep in the morning, some job markets will let you do that. It turns out that some cities run early, while others run late – by as much as an hour difference. With a little digging, we discovered that the Census asks people what time they leave for work.

The top sleep-in metros in the country are New York, San Francisco, and San Jose – where the typical worker in those markets leaves for work at 8:00 AM. At the other extreme, the typical worker in Houston, Phoenix, Honolulu, and several other metros leaves for work at 7:00 AM.

Why are New Yorkers and San Franciscans the latest to leave their house in the morning? Not because they spend less time getting to work: New Yorkers have the longest commutes in the country, and San Francisco traffic is no picnic, either. In fact, there’s no clear pattern between when people leave for work and the length of the commute that awaits them.

Instead, time zones seem to be a factor: most of the later-leaving-home metros work on Eastern Time , while most of the earlier-leaving-home metros are in other time zones. That’s good for people who need to be in sync with the rest of the country: the later easterners start their day – or the earlier everyone else starts their day – there’s more overlap of working hours across the country. But that’s just a guess from someone who wakes up really early in California in order to catch economic data releases at 8:30 AM Eastern Time!

In short: local labor markets in the U.S. differ in expected and unexpected ways. What makes local job markets unlike each other isn’t only the industries that happen to cluster there. Don’t overlook the differences in earnings, equality, and how early the day starts when thinking about your next big job-related move.

Note: Data on reasons for moving are from the Census’s 2012 Current Population Survey March supplement. Unemployment data are for July 2013, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data on earnings and time leaving for work are from the American Community Survey 2011 5-Year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Unemployment and time leaving for work are based on the metro where people live. Earnings data are based on the metro where people work.