According to RENTCafe, tech-heavy markets in the U.S including San Jose, Raleigh-Durham, Austin, and San Francisco are seeing the gap between wages and rent widen. The average rent in San Jose is now at $2,871, a 6.9% increase between 2016 and 2019. At the same time the area showed a wage decrease of 0.8%.
Washington metro has the second largest share of IT jobs, a possible reason being the presence of tech icons that are hiring in the area, such as IBM, Oracle, or HP. Despite being second in terms of job shares, the metro boasts the highest net number of IT jobs in our top – 228,060. Renters living here saw one of the weakest rent increases in the top, of 5.8%, while the wages of IT workers went up by 6.8%. The metro is one of the few in our top to have witnessed its wages outpacing rents.
Third in our top is Seattle, where the presence of both Microsoft and Amazon has certainly helped the metro reach the high 6.8% share of IT jobs. Salaries in the metro remain considerably high at $115,500, but so are the rents which increased by 11.7% in a 3-year period, reaching an average of $1,825 in 2019.
A big surprise is Madison metro, which placed fourth in the nation, with a considerable share of 6.2% of IT jobs. The metro also has the lowest average wage in the top, although it went up by 10.7% during the 3-year period. Employees working in IT here earn about $80,800, while the average rent is $1,167 per month.
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