CareerBuilder’s website is devoted to helping employers and job seekers find each other. Their surveys provide information to employers about what is important to today’s employee. In one such survey, eighty-nine percent of Americans listed salary as the most important factor when deciding whether or not to accept a job offer. Fifty percent of these same respondents felt that they were currently underpaid.

Salary Knowledge

It is important to know the average pay for a certain position when seeking a job or raise. This knowledge can allow a person to give a more informed answer when employers ask interviewees to give a desired salary range. A person’s education, previous work experience, geographic location, and benefits package should be taken into consideration when trying to determine an adequate salary. There are various websites such as Salary and Homestore that can help determine salary for any location.

Salary Statistics

The cost of living can differ substantially from city to city. It is important to know the expected cost of living for a particular city. The following data compares the ten largest United States cities based on the national salary average. The average salary of United States workers was about $36,700 in 2002. The ten largest cities in the United States are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Antonio, Dallas, and Detroit. The cost of living comparison that follows uses the largest Unites States’ city, New York, as the comparison standard, and all calculations are made based on renting housing as opposed to owning.

Comparison

If an individual makes $36,700 in New York, they would need to earn $25,000 to maintain the same standard of living if they moved to Los Angeles. That same individual would need to earn $33,100 in Chicago, $28,100 in Houston, $25,700 in Dallas, $25,800 in San Antonio, $30,360 in Philadelphia, $22,400 in Phoenix, $24,500 in San Diego and $27,550 in Detroit to maintain the same standard of living that they enjoyed in New York. This data shows that, of the ten largest cities in the United States, Phoenix has the lowest cost of living available to a person who earns the average American worker’s salary.

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