Changes in Wages and Occupational Mix of Fourth District Metro Areas Between 2019 and 2022

In some cases, the change in a group’s employment share in the metro area differed notably from the group’s change nationwide. For example, in Akron, Columbus, and Toledo the increase in the employment share of the Transportation and Material Moving group was more than double the group’s national increase. While the Healthcare Support group’s employment share rose slightly in the nation, this group’s share declined in all of the District metro areas except Erie.

Figure 2 shows each metro area’s occupation mix in 2022, with groups sorted by share of US employment. The differences between the occupation mix of a metro area and the nation sometimes reflect economic specialization. Manufacturing is a specialty of the economies of most of the District metro areas, which leads them to have a higher share of Production occupation group employment than the nation as a whole. Healthcare is another specialty of District metro areas, hence the Healthcare Practitioners and Technical group has a higher employment share in each District metro than in the nation.

A high share of Columbus’s employment is in the Transportation and Material Moving group—12.3 percent—compared to 9.2 percent in the nation.

There are some distinct differences in occupation mix across District metro areas. For example, the Management, Business, and Financial group and the Legal, Computer, Math, Engineering, and Science group are a smaller share of employment in the small District metro areas (Canton, Erie, Huntington, and Youngstown) than in the other District metro areas, or in the nation. In fact, these two white-collar occupation groups are less prevalent in the small District metro areas than in the majority of other metro areas of similar size.³

Wages of Occupation Groups

Now let’s turn our attention to how much particular kinds of work pay.

Nationally, the occupation groups with the highest average hourly wages are Management, Business, and Financial ($52.34); Legal, Computer, Math, Engineering, and Science ($49.80); and Healthcare Practitioners and Technical ($46.52) (Figure 3). These are also the highest wage occupation groups in District metro areas. However, in District metro areas, the average wage of each of these groups is below the national average, with the differences largest in the small metro areas.

Aside from those three high wage occupation groups and the Other Service group, the average wage of an occupation group in the large District metro areas is close to the national average. On the other hand, nearly all occupation groups in the small District metro areas have average wages below the groups’ national average wages. This lag in wages is typical of the nation’s small metro areas. The occupation group wages of the mid-sized District metro areas sit between those of the large and small District metro areas.

Figure 4 shows the change in occupation groups’ wages between 2019 and 2022. District metro areas had uneven changes in occupation groups’ average wages. One way to summarize these changes is to count how many of the 13 occupation groups had increases in average wages of at least $2.50 per hour—the higher the count, the larger the increases in average wages.⁴

The number of occupation groups meeting this threshold include:

• 12 in the nation
• 11 in Lexington and Toledo
• 10 in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus
• 8 in Akron and Pittsburgh
• 7 or fewer in the remaining metro areas.

In metro areas where relatively few occupation groups met the $2.50 increase threshold, high wage occupation groups tended to have smaller increases in average wages than in the nation as a whole. For example, the average wage of the Management, Business, and Financial occupation group rose by $5.17 in the nation, and by less than half of that in 7 of the 12 metro areas.

Wage Distributions

Next, we look at District metro areas’ overall wage distributions, which are the aggregate effects of all the differences in occupation mix and occupation wages discussed above.

Figure 5 compares the wage distributions and wage levels of the District metro areas to that of the nation at five percentiles (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th). A percentile of a wage distribution is the wage that is above the wage of a certain percent of workers. For example, the 25th percentile wage in the nation in 2022 is $16.03, so 25 percent of US workers had a wage below $16.03.

In each District metro area, the difference between the metro area’s hourly wages and the nation’s wage is larger at higher percentiles. For example, the gap between the 75th percentile wages of Lexington and the nation is more than double the gap between their 50th percentile wages ($4.99 vs. $1.76). At each of the five percentiles, Cleveland and Columbus have the highest wages among the District metros. These two metro areas’ wages are no more than 70 cents below the nation’s wages for all the percentiles except the 90th percentile, where the gap is over $3. The small metro areas have notably lower wages than the other District metros. All four small metro areas have 10th percentile wages below $11.00 and 90th percentile wages below $40.00, compared to at least $11.51 and $41.96 for the same percentiles in medium metros and $11.65 and $48.80 in large metros.

In all but one District metro area, wage inequality grew less between 2019 and 2022 in the metro area than in the nation.⁵ Figure 6 shows that the amount of wage growth was more equal across percentiles in District metro areas than in the nation. For example, nationally the 25th percentile wage rose by $2.67 and the 90th percentile wage rose by $7.73, while the corresponding increases in Youngstown were $2.66 and $3.21. Huntington, Lexington, and Toledo stand out from the other District metro areas because their 90th percentile wages rose much more than their wages at other percentiles. In fact, Toledo was the one District metro area where wage inequality grew more than it did in the nation between 2019 and 2022.

Summary

This review uncovered patterns around occupational mixes and wage distributions within District metro areas that mirror both national trends and departures from them that reflect the Fourth District’s unique economic makeup.

Overall, changes in occupational mix spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic—such as the reduction in Food Serving and Preparation employment and the increase in Transportation and Material Moving employment—were similar in District metro areas and the nation.

The occupational mixes and wages of District metro areas vary with the total employment in those metros. Large metro areas (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Pittsburgh) have wage distributions and occupational mixes that are similar to the nation as a whole, except that these metro areas have lower average wages for a few high-wage professional categories.

The small metro areas (Canton, Erie, Huntington, and Youngstown) have lower wages than the nation for most occupation groups and a smaller share of their employment is in high-wage professional occupation groups. The mid-sized metro areas (Akron, Dayton, Lexington, and Toledo) fall between the two other size classes, with wages similar to the nation’s in the bottom half of their wage distributions and lower than the nation’s in the top quarter of their wage distributions. The Production, Healthcare Support, and the Healthcare Practitioners and Technical occupation groups are more prevalent in the small and mid-sized District metro areas than in the nation as a whole.

The Production category, in particular, is more prevalent in District metro areas than in the nation as a whole, reflecting the importance of manufacturing in the Fourth District economy.