What People Earn Is Expanding Most Rapidly In America’s Heartland

Sep 15, 2015

Paychecks are expanding more rapidly in the nation’s heartland than anywhere else in America.

Five major markets enjoyed income growth of at least 2.5 percent per year between 2009 and 2014 — and four are located in a narrow belt from Arkansas and Oklahoma to Texas.

Atop the list is the Fayetteville, Arkansas metropolitan area, which is best known as the home base of Wal-Mart Stores.

The typical worker in the northwestern corner of Arkansas earned $42,410 in 2014, the latest year for which official statistics are available. That represented an annual increase of 2.9 percent from the 2009 average of $36,790.

Oklahoma City (growth of 2.6 percent per year in personal earnings), Tulsa (2.6 percent), and Houston (2.5 percent) are the other pacesetters in the south-central part of the country.

The only geographic exception among the five growth leaders is San Jose, California, where incomes increased at an annual rate of 2.6 percent.

American City Business Journals analyzed five years of employment and salary data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The study encompassed all 106 markets with at least 200,000 full-time and part-time jobs in BLS’s database.

The average annual pay for all U.S. workers grew 1.7 percent per year during the half-decade — from $43,460 in 2009 to $47,230 in 2014. Thirty-nine markets exceeded that pace, nine matched it, and 58 fell short.

Many other areas, of course, have not been as fortunate. Ten major markets — areas that failed to recover quickly from the recession — were saddled with annual income-growth rates of less than 1 percent between 2009 and 2014. The worst, just 0.2 percent per year, belongs to Cape Coral-Fort Myers on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Here’s a quick look at income trends in the four sections of the country:

East

Few Eastern metros — eight, to be exact — experienced above-average income growth. And they’re not the places you might expect. The regional leaders are Providence, Rhode Island (2.2 percent per year), Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (also 2.2 percent) and Springfield, Massachusetts, at 2.0 percent.

South

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Fayetteville, North Carolina is No. 1 in the income-growth standings. A recent report from the Global Insight research firm predicted that Fayetteville will experience the nation’s third-fastest rate of economic expansion through 2020, thanks to its mix of big businesses, agriculture and construction. Other Southern metros with impressive growth rates for personal earnings are Charleston, South Carolina. (2.1 percent per year), Virginia Beach Virginia (2.1 percent) and Nashville, Tennessee (2.0 percent).

Midwest

Look to Ohio — yes, Ohio — for the strongest income growth in the Midwest: Akron at 2.1 percent per year and Cleveland at 2.0 percent. Des Moines, Iowa, also at 2.0 percent, is the only other Midwestern market to reach that threshold.

West

San Jose bounced back nicely from the recession to post an annual increase of 2.6 percent in average pay, tying for second place nationally. Several other Western metros did nearly as well. Paychecks ballooned by 2.4 percent per year in Salt Lake City 2.2 percent in San Francisco-Oakland and 2.0 percent in Seattle.