Southern US states have enjoyed some of the strongest job growth in the pandemic era, as well as some of the biggest wage increases — and they’re luring Americans from elsewhere in the country.
Add those things together and they explain why three southern states — Florida, Texas and North Carolina — are leading the way when it comes to grabbing a bigger share of the national paycheck, according to new state-level data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the four years through September 2023, those states boosted their combined share of US private wages to 17.8% from 16.5%, according to the latest Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages conducted by the BLS.
At least some of their gains came at the expense of other states. The bottom dozen states saw a collective decline of 1.6 percentage points in their share of US wages. The drop was led by New York, followed by a handful of mostly northern states as well as California.
Map: Change in aggregate U.S. private sector wages, Q3 2019 to Q3 2023. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bloomberg News calculations.
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