By Patrick May
The Mercury News
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) Turns out a 100K salary IS something to sneeze at, at least in Silicon Valley.
The Mercury News
Are you making more than $100,000 in the Bay Area and feeling pretty full of yourself?
Well, don’t.
According to a new survey, a household in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan region would have to bring in 0,000 a year just to be included among the top 50 percent of wage earners.
That’s right. Not the top 10 percent. Not even the top third. But just down there around the middle-of-the-road middling middle.
And in order to claim that that mediocre status, your household income would have to beat out every other metro region in United States, including San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward ($96,677) and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria ($95,843).
Blame it on all those Silicon Valley engineers, VC mavens and wet-behind-the-ears billionaire Millennials whose nose-bleed salaries jack up the bar for the rest of us.
For the survey, the cost information website Howmuch.net gathered average household income figures from the U.S. Census Bureau for the top 50 most populated metro areas for 2016, the latest year for which numbers were available.
They then plotted each city as a slice on an exploding pie chart that quickly shows you how much money your household would need to make to be in the top 50 percent of earners in your area.
New Orleans, LA is way down at the very bottom, where the average household only brings in $48,800. “Making six figures means a family is in the middle class in Silicon Valley, but for most of the country, that much money would be a dream come true,” said the survey’s authors.
Here are the top ten:
1. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara: $110,040
2. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward: $96,677
3. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria: $95,843
4. Boston-Cambridge-Newton: $82,380
5. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue: $78,612
6. Baltimore-Columbia-Towson: $76,788
7. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington: $73,231
8. Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford: $72,559
9. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood: $71,926
10. New York-Newark-Jersey City: $71,897
