Your living standards are largely dictated by where you live and which industry you work in.

It does sometimes feel as if we are all on rafts being swept this way and that by large economic, technological, and demographic forces.

Let’s decrease (or increase?) our collective anxiety by studying the job market. Help by collecting and updating relevant data and submitting edits to this page. We are going to improve this page over time.

Give me the dataaa

Everyone quotes the unemployment rate so let’s do the same!

That doesn’t look too bad…

Oh so the average person can’t afford a family without both partners working.

And if you live in a city (where all the good jobs are) cost of living is way higher.

Serious question: how people with low skill service jobs (hairdressers, waiters, teachers, firefighters etc.) live in expensive cities? How long is there commute?

Some basic stats based on Average Salary in the US 2023: By Age, Gender, Race and State (finmasters.com)

Average full-time job salary in the USA: $76, 554

Median full-time job salary in the USA: $56,473

(The super rich are pulling the average up)

Data by job sectors

What sectors is everyone working in??? Data from the US Bureau of labor statistics

We truly are a service-based economy. I am amazed that professional and business services, health care and social assistance, and state and local government are the three largest sectors. Poor utilities keep the economy running but have no jobs.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find data which goes further back in time. I would like to see the fall of manufacturing jobs correlated with globalization. If you can find such a dataset comment or make an edit.

Mean annual wage by occupation (top 250 occupations)

data from 2022 Occupation, Employment, and Wage statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. May 2022 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates (bls.gov)

Top 100 occupations

Still pays to be a specialized doctor!

Bottom 100 Occupations

I wonder if they are not including “Fast food server” and such jobs as an occupation. I mean the average wage in the USA was $76,554 and the median was $56,473! It sounds like this dataset is grossly biased towards richer occupations.

Where are industry jobs located?

Here is a cool dataset visualizer by David Peterson who has his own medium article about employment growth trends based on area.

You can go through many different industries in the visualization tool. But here are where most of the health care and social assistance jobs are located. (Hey Rust belt are you ok?)

Here are where all the information type jobs are concentrated. Notice that the circle size are the total jobs in the area, the color indicates if there is a larger percentage of jobs in the industry. So Silicon Valley has a small circle (not as many people work there) but it is a dark green (high percentage of information-based jobs).

Here is Manufacturing.

And here are the places to avoid in America JK JK. Please don’t increase my rates.

Got more data??? Help build this topic up! Kick this text off the hill by adding improvements. I’ll vote for you!