NerdWallet, the 6-year-old financial literacy site based in San Francisco that publishes easy-to-use personal finance info on everything from credit card rates to airport parking costs, has just released a list of the best places for technology jobs. In January I posted a piece on the highest-paying cities for tech jobs, using information tech job listings site Dice culled from its own database of job listings and salaries.
As useful as the Dice list is, we think NerdWallet’s list may be even more helpful for tech workers who are looking at the bigger picture when deciding where to settle and look for work. First NerdWallet looks at the number of tech jobs as a share of total jobs by calculating tech employees per 1,000 total jobs in a metro area, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data from May 2014. That data accounts for 50% of the score. (The BLS doesn’t break out tech jobs as a category so NerdWallet crunches numbers for 16 different jobs, from software developers to computer network architects.) For 25% of the score it looks at annual mean wages for tech jobs. That data comes from the same BLS source. Then for the remaining 25% it adds in median gross rent for each area, culling data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013 American Community Survey. In other words, salary accounts for only a quarter of the score. The rest comes from the potential number of employment opportunities and the cost of living in a given area.
NerdWallet starts with the nation’s 370 metro areas. The national average of tech jobs for every 1,000 is 18, way below the numbers in the top 10 tech cities (the lowest number in the group, in Boston, is 50). Nationwide, tech workers make out very well, most earning well more than the national mean of $70,500.
Still, the number one spot, not surprisingly, is the same as in the Dice survey: Silicon Valley, which encompasses San Jose, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, CA. Some of the biggest names in tech are located here, including Apple, Adobe and eBay, plus hundreds of startups, and of course Stanford, which spits out top tech grads. More than a tenth of the jobs in this area are in tech—126 per 1,000—through I might have thought it would be even more. The average tech salary is the highest on NerdWallet’s list at $130,000 a year. Rents aren’t cheap, at a median of $1,600 a month.
The second-best metro area is Huntsville, AL, which didn’t make the Dice list. NerdWallet describes it as “the heart of the Southern tech scene.” Huntsville is nicknamed “Rocket City,” for the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, where there are many tech jobs. Sixty-eight out of every 1,000 jobs in Huntsville are in tech-related fields. Cummings Research Park, a science and business park with hundreds of jobs, is also there. Average salaries are at the lower end of NerdWallet’s measure at $92,296 but median rent is the lowest on the list, at $725 a month.
No. 3, Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, scores in second place on NerdWallet’s list. It’s home to tech giants Amazon and Microsoft and aerospace leader Boeing, plus smaller tech-heavy companies like Expedia and Zillow and CA-based Google, Facebook and Twitter also have offices there. Of every 1,000 jobs, 77 are in tech. Salaries are high, at $108,000, and rents aren’t bad, at $1,100 a month.
See our slideshow above for the remaining 10 cities, including statistics and big employers. And click here for Nerdwallet’s list of 100 metro areas.
