High-Wage Job Share

The $3,333 per month cutoff is a fixed nominal figure. It is not adjusted for inflation, so as wages rise across the economy more jobs cross it every year for reasons that have nothing to do with any particular tract. The level is therefore a sound comparison between tracts within a year, and the trends are best read as which tracts moved faster or slower than the national drift, not as an absolute measure of improving pay.

The bands are wide and there is no upper one. Every job above the threshold counts the same, whether it pays a little over it or many times it, so the measure cannot distinguish a tract of moderately paid professional work from one of highly paid work.

Underlying counts are protected. The Bureau's methods "distort values by infusing noise at the employer and establishment levels and by weighting to control totals," with the same factor applied to a worksite across years (LODES Design and Methodology Report). In tracts with few jobs the share rests on a small denominator and is correspondingly unstable.

Coverage is limited to unemployment insurance covered wage and salary jobs, which excludes the self-employed, informal workers, the military and postal workers. Alaska has published no workplace data since 2016 and Michigan none since 2021, so trend windows ending later than those years carry no value there.