2004 Occupational Pay Comparisons Among Metropolitan Areas — 2005-12-28

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor has produced occupational "pay relatives" to facilitate comparisons of occupational pay between metropolitan areas and the United States as a whole. BLS periodically has issued occupational pay relatives using data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS) and its predecessor surveys, and now plans to publish them annually. Using data for 2004 from the NCS, pay relatives have been prepared for each of 9 major occupational groups within 78 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), as well as averaged across all occupations for each area. The pay relative in 2004 for workers in construction and extraction occupations in the San Francisco MSA was 127, meaning the pay in San Francisco in that occupational group averaged 27 percent more than the national average pay for workers in that occupational group (table 1).