Jobs and Metropolitan Areas Where Earnings Average More Than $100,000

Sometimes the best way to boost your pay is to pull up stakes and move to a region of the country where wages are higher. To be sure, sometimes high-wage localities also have a high cost of living, meaning that your improved earnings will put you into a higher tax bracket without buying you a more comfortable lifestyle.

But in other cases you can genuinely improve your circumstances by relocating. For example, for industries that involve a lot of collaborative work, businesses tend to cluster in certain geographical areas (think of Hollywood for the movies, Nashville for music, or Silicon Valley for high tech). Workers who live in such hubs of collaborative activity often can be more productive and thus more able to achieve an affluent standard of living than workers who are located elsewhere. On the other hand, for jobs where people tend to work solo (think of Dentists or Massage Therapists), the reverse is often true-workers can earn more if they move to a region where there are few colleagues and therefore little competition.

If you are thinking of relocating to improve your earnings, some other factors you should consider are the amount and cost of the commuting you may have to do. The time and expense of commuting can effectively erode your earning power. For example, let's say you're earning $1,200 per week for 40 hours of work, which equals $30 per hour. If your daily commute to and from work takes an hour each way, you're actually devoting 50 hours per week to your work, which means you are effectively earning $24 per hour. After you also subtract your costs for gasoline, tolls, and the wear and tear on your vehicle, your job in your new location actually may not be paying you more than your old job in your old location. So the relationship between the location of your job and your earnings can be a complex matter.

To create the following list, we analyzed the OES figures for the earnings of the 250 bestpaying jobs in various metropolitan areas and identified those combinations where workers are earning an average of above $100,000. We did not include instances where fewer than 1,000 workers are employed in a metropolitan area unless the workers in this area represent more than three percent of the national workforce for the occupation. The jobs are ordered alphabetically.