OCCUPATIONAL PAY COMPARISONS AMONG METROPOLITAN AREAS, 2009
"Average pay for civilian workers in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA metropolitan area was 20 percent above the national average in 2009, one of 77 metropolitan areas studied by the National Compensation Survey (NCS), the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The Brownsville-Harlingen, TX metropolitan area had a pay relative of 79, meaning workers earned an average of 79 cents for every dollar earned by workers nationwide. Using data from the NCS, pay relatives—a means of assessing pay differences—are available for each of the nine major occupational groups within surveyed metropolitan areas, as well as averaged across all occupations for each area. The average pay relative nationally for all occupations and for each occupational group equals 100. (See table 1.)

A pay relative is a calculation of pay—wages, salaries, commissions, and production bonuses—for a
given metropolitan area relative to the nation as a whole. The calculation controls for differences among areas in occupational composition, establishment and occupational characteristics, and the fact that data are collected for areas at different times during the year. Simple pay comparisons calculating the ratio of the average pay for an area to the entire United States in percentage terms would not control for interarea differences in occupational composition and other factors, which may impact pay relatives... "