Average Salaries Across the US in 2019

From Business.org, October, 2019

Ever been curious about which states have the best pay? Us too. So we compared the average salary in each state to the housing costs to find where salaries go furthest.

You might have to give up on big-city living to really stretch your salary—all the 10 best states can easily be described as “rural.” But once you know how much further your pay is taking you in these states, will you really miss walking to the corner bodega?

Bottom 10 states with the worst pay

HAWAII

• Rank - 5
• Median yearly wage -- $42,480
• Median monthly rent for 1 BR apartment -- $1,720
• Hours of work to afford apartment -- 84.2

You’re probably not surprised by the bottom 10. After all, cities like Seattle, Boston, and New York City have notoriously high housing prices. Oh, and all of Hawaii too.

In fact, the only surprise is that California didn’t come dead last. In San Francisco, it takes 100 hours to afford a one-bedroom apartment. You’ll do slightly better in San Diego (91 hours), and even better in Riverside (85 hours), but let’s just say it’s no Wyoming….

Methodology

To create our ranking, we calculated how many hours at the median hourly wage it took to afford the median one-bedroom apartment in each state. Median wage data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Median one-bedroom cost was sourced from Zillow.com. Each data point is from 05/2018....

read … Full Report

PBN: Hawaii among states with worst pay in the country, report finds