Where the Jobs Are

The most extreme location quotients in America belong to what are effectively company towns — metros whose economies are so dominated by a single industry that they would be unrecognizable without it. The most striking example in the 2024 data is Wichita, Kansas, where aircraft assemblers have a location quotient of 154.31. That means Wichita has 154 times the national share of aircraft assemblers. In practical terms, Wichita employs 10,100 aircraft structure, surfaces, rigging, and systems assemblers — and the national total is only about 42,000. One metro area accounts for nearly a quarter of every aircraft assembler in the country.

This is the legacy of the Cessna, Beechcraft, and Learjet factories that turned Wichita into the “Air Capital of the World” in the 1920s and 1930s. A century later, the moniker still fits. Spirit AeroSystems (now being reacquired by Boeing), Textron Aviation, and Bombardier’s Learjet division still dominate the local economy, and the supply chain that supports them — machinists, mechanical engineers, quality inspectors, sheet metal workers — creates a cascade of related jobs that wouldn’t exist in a city without aviation. Wichita’s median wage of $46,250 is middle-of-the-pack precisely because those 10,000 assemblers earn roughly $45,000–$55,000 — solid industrial wages but nowhere near the tech compensation that drives coastal medians.

California’s Central Valley tells a parallel story in agriculture. Salinas (LQ 89x for farmworkers), Visalia-Porterville (75x), Bakersfield (60x), and Fresno (35x) are metros where farmworker employment is 35 to 89 times the national average. Salinas alone employs 28,120 farmworkers — in a metro of only about 200,000 total jobs. This is the “Salad Bowl of the World” — the Salinas Valley where Dole, Taylor Farms, and hundreds of smaller growers produce the lettuce, strawberries, and broccoli that end up on tables across the country. Farmworker median wages hover around $32,000–$38,000, which explains why these metros have some of the lowest overall medians in California despite being in one of the highest-wage states.

Las Vegas is another company town in all but name. Its LQ for gaming dealers is 26.05 — meaning it has 26 times the national concentration. The 15,690 gaming dealers on the Strip and in the downtown casinos are the visible face of an industry that also employs tens of thousands of hotel workers, food servers, entertainment staff, and security personnel. Las Vegas’s overall median of $45,120 reflects this tourism-heavy mix: a few high-paying management and entertainment jobs atop a very large base of $30,000–$45,000 service positions.

The tech industry’s geographic concentration is less extreme than agriculture or aviation — no metro has 100x the national share of software developers — but its economic impact is far greater because the jobs pay so much more. San Jose’s software developer LQ of 7.42x means it has 7.4 times the national concentration. That translates to 90,280 software developers earning a median of $208,270 — a total wage bill for that single occupation in that single metro of roughly $18.8 billion. For comparison, the entire annual payroll of Wyoming (all occupations, all workers) is $16.8 billion. One occupation in one city generates more in wages than an entire state.

Boulder, CO (LQ 3.71), Seattle (3.25), and San Francisco (2.98) form the next tier of tech concentration. Seattle’s 72,730 software developers work primarily for Amazon, Microsoft, and the hundreds of startups and established firms that cluster around them. San Francisco’s 76,900 developers are spread across a broader ecosystem of fintech, biotech, and enterprise software companies. Both metros pay median developer wages above $170,000.

What makes the tech map unusual compared to other specializations is the emergence of secondary hubs. Huntsville, Alabama (LQ 2.51, 7,010 developers at $121,320 median) became a tech center through defense contracting: the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center create demand for software engineers who build missile guidance systems, space launch software, and military communications networks. Durham-Chapel Hill, NC (LQ 2.34) grew its tech sector through the Research Triangle Park — a planned research campus created in 1959 that now hosts IBM, Cisco, and dozens of biotech firms. Austin (LQ 2.09, 28,210 developers at $133,070) is the youngest hub, having attracted Tesla, Apple, Oracle, and Samsung in the 2010s and 2020s with lower taxes, lower housing costs, and a university pipeline from UT Austin.

At the state level, the concentration data confirms the same pattern. DC has 67.2 computer and math workers per 1,000 jobs, followed by Washington (60.2), Virginia (58.6), Maryland (50.8), and Colorado (47.1). At the bottom: Louisiana (13.2), Mississippi (14.2), and Wyoming (14.6) — states where for every 1,000 workers, fewer than 15 are in tech. The ratio between DC’s tech density and Louisiana’s is more than 5 to 1.

The location quotient at the state level paints each state’s economic identity in a single number. DC’s highest LQ is 7.12 for Legal Occupations — a concentration seven times the national average. This is the city of lobbyists, regulatory attorneys, congressional counsel, and Supreme Court clerks. The capital has more lawyers per capita than any place in America, and their compensation ($155,000+ median) pulls the entire district’s wage structure upward. DC also leads in arts and media (3.78x), life sciences (2.81x), business and financial operations (2.39x), and management (2.09x) — a portrait of a city that produces information, analysis, and influence rather than physical goods.

California’s signature is agriculture: a 4.16x LQ for farming, fishing, and forestry occupations. Oregon (2.38x) and Idaho (2.28x) also punch above their weight in this category, but California’s dominance is absolute — the state employs more farmworkers than the next five states combined. This concentration is the reason California’s median is lower than you might expect given its tech sector: the hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers in the Central Valley earn $30,000–$40,000 and pull the statewide median down from where San Jose and San Francisco would otherwise push it.

The Manufacturing Belt is clearly visible in the production LQ data. Indiana leads with an LQ of 1.99x for production occupations (112.8 workers per 1,000 jobs), followed by Wisconsin (1.86x, 105.5 per 1,000), Alabama (1.81x), Michigan (1.79x), and Kentucky (1.69x). These are the states where assembly lines still define the local economy — automotive in Michigan and Indiana, food processing in Wisconsin and Iowa, chemicals and plastics in Alabama and Kentucky. Production workers earn a median of roughly $38,000–$45,000, which keeps these states in the middle of the national wage distribution.

The tourism states emerge through food preparation and serving concentrations. Hawaii leads at 133.6 food workers per 1,000 jobs, followed by Nevada (131.3) — the two most tourism-dependent states in the nation. Florida (102.2 per 1,000) is third. These states have low overall medians precisely because such a large share of their workforce is in food service, which pays a national median of $30,650. When one in seven workers earns around $30,000, it drags the entire state median downward no matter how many high-paying jobs exist elsewhere.

No city in America illustrates the relationship between occupational concentration and wages as cleanly as Washington, DC. The capital has the highest LQ for legal occupations (7.12x), the highest share of management jobs (148.7 per 1,000, versus a national average of about 74), the second-highest tech concentration (67.2 per 1,000), and the highest share of business and financial operations (2.39x). It has nearly the lowest share of production workers (6.3 per 1,000, versus 56 nationally) and a below-average share of food service workers (78.5 per 1,000 versus 88 nationally).

The result is the highest median wage in the country: $88,000. Washington doesn’t have one dominant industry; it has four high-paying ones — government, law, tech, and consulting — and virtually none of the low-paying ones that weigh on other cities. There are no auto plants, no farms, no oil rigs, no casino floors. The city’s economy is almost entirely composed of occupations that pay above the national median. When your workforce skews this heavily toward knowledge-economy jobs, a high median isn’t a sign of unusual prosperity — it’s an arithmetic inevitability.

Boston tells a similar story through a different lens. Its LQ of 20.51x for biochemists and biophysicists (12,430 workers) reflects the Kendall Square biotech cluster — the densest concentration of pharmaceutical and biotechnology research in the world. Moderna, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, and dozens of smaller firms employ biochemists at median wages well above $100,000. Combined with Boston’s concentration in higher education, healthcare (the Massachusetts General and Brigham complex), and financial services (Fidelity, State Street), the city has assembled a portfolio of high-paying specializations that collectively drive its median to $64,620.

For workers, the location quotient data carries a practical message: the job you can get depends on where you live, and the job you can get determines what you earn. A young person growing up in Wichita who has mechanical aptitude will find abundant opportunities in aircraft assembly and aerospace manufacturing — well-paying, stable jobs that require no college degree. The same person growing up in Orlando will find those opportunities nearly nonexistent and will instead face a labor market dominated by tourism, hospitality, and healthcare support — lower-paying sectors with flatter career ladders.

This creates what economists call path dependence. Workers develop skills suited to the dominant local industry, which makes them more productive in that industry but less mobile across geographies. A Wichita sheet metal worker with 15 years of experience at Spirit AeroSystems would need to start nearly from scratch in a San Jose tech company. A Las Vegas gaming dealer with two decades of floor experience has skills that are essentially worthless in every other metro in America. The specialization that makes a city’s economy efficient also makes its workers fragile — dependent on the continued health of an industry they didn’t choose so much as inherit from their geography.

The most resilient metros are the least specialized. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia have relatively modest LQs for any single occupation — their economies are diversified across finance, healthcare, education, manufacturing, logistics, technology, and government. No single industry collapsing would devastate their wage structure the way an aviation downturn would devastate Wichita or an oil bust would crush Houston. Diversification is the insurance policy against the risks of specialization — it lowers the ceiling but raises the floor.

For America as a whole, the specialization map reveals a labor market that is far less national than it appears. We talk about “the” unemployment rate, “the” median wage, “the” jobs report — as if 150 million workers share a single market. They don’t. They work in hundreds of local markets, each with its own dominant occupations, wage levels, career paths, and vulnerabilities. The American Paycheck is not one paycheck. It is 528 of them.