DALLAS — This story was originally published by our content partners at the Dallas Business Journal. You can read the original version here.
Dallas-Fort Worth has one of the country's strongest job markets.
DFW added nearly 68,000 jobs from July 2023 to July 2024, according to the latest federal and state estimates — and its 4.1% unemployment rate was lower than the United States average of 4.5% and Texas' 4.4% rate.
Good-paying jobs are what attract so many people to the Metroplex and keep them here. They help explain why a landlocked region with no ocean, no mountains and summer temperatures regularly in the triple digits remains one of the hottest places in the country for population growth. And all of the wealth created by those jobs fuels home-buying, spending at grocery stores and restaurants and many types of consumer purchases.
The availability of jobs and what they pay should be top of mind for business and government leaders. So what does the data tell us?
Using estimates from May 2023, the latest available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can pinpoint 111 careers that have average annual pay of at least $100,000. Check out the full list below, which looks similar to past lineups and shouldn't surprise with its preponderance of medical and management positions.
But first, a few interesting takeaways:
• We all know chief executives get paid a lot, but they get paid a lot more in Dallas. In DFW, CEOs ranked third among all occupations with an annual mean wage of $335,780. Nationally, the average in May 2023 was $258,900. That likely reflects the high concentration of large, sophisticated companies headquartered in the Metroplex, with 24 Fortune 500 headquarters and 49 HQs from the Fortune 1000 as of 2023, according to the Dallas Regional Chamber.
• Airline pilots and flight engineers rank higher on the North Texas list than in many other places; these kinds of jobs are nearly twice as prevalent here than the nation as a whole. But the average pay in DFW was actually slightly lower than the national average of $250,050.
• In addition to the many medical professions near the top of the DFW list, architectural and engineering managers, lawyers, computer and information systems managers, financial managers, physicists and judges placed in the top 25.
So what do you think? Does this list surprise you, or inspire you to action? Send me a note at wanderson@bizjournals.com and I may use the comments in an upcoming story with attribution.
