San Diego among California cities with fastest growing wages

(NEXSTAR) – Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed that the cost of living – including gas, food, rent and everything else – has gone up dramatically. There is a silver lining for residents of some California cities, where wages are also rising.

money geek analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the nation’s 75 largest metropolitan areas to determine where wages are going up and where they are falling.

Have incomes increased in California’s largest cities? MoneyGeek found mixed results.

Of the major metropolitan areas, Fresno saw the largest wage increase in 2022. In Fresno, hourly wages rose nearly 8%, according to MoneyGeek data shared with Nexstar. Despite this jump, Fresno residents still earn less than residents of most major California cities on average.

Residents of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, on the other hand, have much higher salaries, but some have seen their incomes contract over the past year. In San Jose, the average hourly rate fell half a percent, MoneyGeek found.

Residents of Bakersfield also saw their incomes drop by an average of about a quarter percent.

See how wages have changed in California’s largest cities in the chart below:

The bad news is that even in the California city with the highest wage growth over the past year, average wages aren’t growing fast enough to keep up with inflation. While Fresno saw hourly wage growth of 7.86% in 2022, year-on-year inflation was 9.1% in June.

Some US cities exceeded that figure by 9.1%. Detroit, Louisville, Austin, Virginia Beach and the city of North Port in Florida all saw hourly wages increase by more than 10%, according to MoneyGeek’s findings.

The national average wage rose 5.11% to $32.08 per hour.