U.S. Pay Rises 2.7 Percent in April: Glassdoor Local Pay Reports

The new April edition of the Glassdoor Local Pay Reports shows U.S. median base pay grew 2.7 percent year over year in April to $51,350 per year according to salaries reported online to Glassdoor. That’s down for the third month in a row -- U.S. pay growth peaked at 3.1 percent in December, and has fallen gradually each month since. Last month, U.S. pay growth was a revised 2.8 percent. The slight decline is something to watch in the coming months, but April’s 2.7 percent pay growth is relatively strong and is well above the 2.3 percent average growth of 2016 and the 1.9 percent growth of 2015, a sign of today’s fast-growing job market.

5 New Markets, Pay Gains by Metro

We’re excited to add five new metros areas to our Local Pay Reports this month: Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C. That brings the report to 10 metro areas and the U.S. total. Among metros, Los Angeles had the fastest year-over-year growth in median base pay of 3.8 percent in April. That’s a slight pull back from last month’s blistering 4.5 percent pay growth, bringing the metro’s median annual pay for full-time workers to $59,639 per year. Los Angeles pay growth was followed by tech-heavy Seattle -- a new metro area added to our report this month -- with 3.1 percent annual pay growth, bringing that city’s median base pay for full-time workers to $59,585. It’s no surprise to see such strong pay growth in Seattle. The relatively new tech hub is dominated by high-paying tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft. Houston again had the nation’s slowest pay growth among the 10 metros we examined, with median base pay rising just 1.0 percent year-over-year in April, to $54,410. Houston is followed by Philadelphia -- another new metro added to this month’s report -- where year-over-year pay growth was 1.6 percent, bringing median base pay to $54,408 per year. You can view the full April 2017 Glassdoor Local Pay Reports here.

Jobs with the Biggest Pay Raises

Jobs that are highest paying aren’t always where we see biggest growth. Here are the five jobs in the U.S. with the biggest percentage growth in base pay from one year ago:

Job Title	Median Base Pay	YoY
Customer Service Manager	$54,177	7.4%
Recruiter	$51,306	6.9%
Store Manager	$48,848	6.6%
Warehouse Associate	$39,920	6.3%
Professor	$90,007	5.8%

At the national level, we’re seeing strong pay gains for store managers and customer service managers as employers struggle to fill these front-line roles. We’re also seeing strong pay growth among warehouse associates, key employees at online retail giants like Amazon and Walmart. Finally, we continue to see rapid pay gains for recruiters, who are in high demand thanks to today’s challenging hiring environment. While the number of U.S. jobs in traditional department store retail has been on the decline, we are seeing wage growth rising for many retail positions, including store managers, cashiers, buyers and retail key holders. One reason retail wages are still rising is that most of the shuttering of retail has happened in large department stores. That trend of closing stores is not happening among smaller boutique retailers, as Americans are shifting away from “commodity buying” to “experience buying” -- spending their dollars at smaller retailers offering in-store experts and a pleasant shopping experience. The jobs with the slowest U.S. pay growth (or declines) year over year in April are:

Job Title	Median Base Pay	YoY
Design Engineer	$70,616	-0.3%
Web Developer	$62,938	-0.1%
Operations Analyst	$53,003	0.2%
Maintenance Worker	$40,150	0.4%
Paralegal	$47,787	0.7%

The weakest U.S. pay growth was for design engineers, a common manufacturing job, which experienced a pay decline of 0.3 percent from a year ago. Web developers also experienced pay declines, a trend we’ve seen consistently as demand for this tech role declines. Pay was also weak for paralegals, reflecting today’s weak labor market for these legal professionals.

Highest and Lowest Paying Jobs

One advantage of Glassdoor salary data compared to most government sources is that we’re able to show pay growth for real-world job titles that workers can easily relate to – rather than the hard-to-understand and often outdated occupational groups used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This helps job seekers understand what job titles are paying best today, helping them search for jobs smarter. In April, the nation’s highest median base pay was found among five key job titles in Glassdoor salary data:

Job Title	Median Base Pay	YoY
Physician	$243,094	2.7%
Attorney	$98,594	3.6%
Data Scientist	$94,944	1.1%
Tax Manager	$93,212	1.2%
Product Manager	$90,538	2.2%

Among the highest-paying jobs, two are in tech (data scientist and product manager), two are in professional services (attorney and tax manager) while one is in health care (physician). These broadly reflects America’s fastest growing industries today. Similarly, the list of the five lowest U.S. median base pay job titles in April was:

Job Title	Median Base Pay	YoY
Cashier	$27,582	5.0%
Bank Teller	$28,549	5.6%
Restaurant Cook	$28,568	5.4%
Retail Key Holder	$29,615	4.2%
Pharmacy Technician	$30,298	3.5%

How Does it Work?

Informed job seekers are better job seekers. At Glassdoor, our goal is to arm job candidates with the facts about pay, so that they be smart when searching for a new job on Glassdoor. Like our Know Your Worth™ tool, the Local Pay Reports incorporate millions of salaries directly collected from U.S. workers by Glassdoor and apply a proprietary machine-learning algorithm to estimate real-time trends in local pay for ten U.S. metros and the nation as a whole. The Local Pay Reports estimate year-over-year growth in median base salaries by job title for 60 jobs across more than 15 job categories including healthcare, technology, retail and more. The reports also estimate median base pay by industry and employer size, and provide a monthly trend of metro-level median base pay for each local market over the past four years. Our new Local Pay Reports fill an important gap in our knowledge about wage growth at the local level for specific jobs. Official BLS “Occupational Employment Statistics” are updated only once per year, and use broad occupational groupings that can be confusing for job seekers. Local Pay Reports are released monthly -- using a powerful and unique data source from Glassdoor -- and show pay for real-world job titles that are easy to understand and search for. Read more in our full methodology and FAQs.

Monthly Jobs Report Expectations

The latest jobs report from the federal government is due out on Friday. This month, we expect to see 168,000 new jobs and an unemployment rate up slightly to 4.6 percent in April. See our full analysis for more commentary and predictions here. To learn more or subscribe to the monthly email alerts, visit: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/. The Glassdoor Local Pay Reports can be found here: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/local-pay-reports/. Press inquiries: To speak with Dr. Andrew Chamberlain about this month’s report, email pr@glassdoor.com. Follow him on Twitter: @adchamberlain.