More than one in 200 workers in San Francisco earns at least $1 million a year, the highest share in the country by quite a distance, according to a new analysis of ADP payroll data.
The study found that about one in 127 jobs in the US pays more than $500,000 a year. In San Francisco that ratio is less than one in 50 — which is also the biggest share in the US — with Austin and New York following, according to the research by Issi Romem, an economist at the ADP Research Institute, based on anonymized payrolls.
“Certain regions stand out for the sheer volume,” Romem said in a blog post. The Bay Area’s wide margin over other wealthy metros reflects the unmatched scale of the tech industry, he said. “Unlike other highly paid professions — such as doctors or lawyers, whose income is limited by the number of patients or clients they can serve — productivity in the tech industry, particularly at large employers, faces fewer constraints.”
What’s more, the Bay Area’s longtime leadership in the high-paying tech industry has ramped up housing prices and squeezed out the region’s low- and middle-income residents — so the concentration of big earners in the local population has increased.
When metro areas are ranked by the prevalence of $1 million paychecks, Florida locales climb higher. On that measure, the Cape Coral-Fort Myers-Naples region takes the No. 2 spot after San Francisco, while North Port-Sarasota and Miami come in at 5th and 7th respectively.
Nationwide, the study found that more than 1 million people are paid at least $500,000 a year. The research is based on hundreds of millions of payroll records from the 12 months through July 2024, including other forms of compensation like bonuses, commissions and stock options.
When it comes to identifying the highest earners, the ADP dataset has an advantage over the US government’s broadest study of demographics and finances, the American Community Survey conducted annually by the Census Bureau. That research also covers household incomes — but it caps the maximum that respondents report, typically at levels well below $1 million, to protect high earners from being identified publicly. By contrast, the ADP works off of actual paychecks and can identify the biggest ones with precision.
