Alabama’s Magic City has received a lot of national attention lately. From the city’s campaign to land Amazon’s new headquarters, to the return of UAB football, to the incredible economic growth that the city is facing, Birmingham has made itself known across the country.
Now, the city has some more magic to add to its ever-growing lists of success: financially, Birmingham is the best city in the U.S. to live and work in. That’s right! According to Forbes and a study conducted by Indeed.com, Birmingham has the highest salaries in the nation after adjusting for the cost of living. The average adjusted salary in the Magic City is $86,196, which gets you a lot of bang for your buck.
Indeed.com said that its report “calculated the average salary for all jobs with annual-salary information posted on Indeed.com between August 2016 and July 2017 in each of the 104 US metropolitan areas with at least 500,000 people, and then adjusted for each metro’s cost of living.”
Behind Birmingham, in second place, is Jackson, Mississippi, whose average adjusted salary is $84,995. Fresno, California rounds out the top three with an average adjusted salary of $84,604. However, noticeably absent from the top of the list are the thriving, larger, more well-known cities in the country. Surely wages in a city such as New York or Chicago are higher than in Birmingham!
Nominally, yes wages in these bigger metropolises are higher. However, the problem with these big cities is that things usually cost more. From rent to groceries, to taxes, these cities are very expensive, making it much more difficult to stretch that hard-earned paycheck. The top big city with the most bang for your buck was Detroit ($81,474), followed by Atlanta ($80,271) and then later Chicago ($76,201).
Many of the nation’s top cities landed on Indeed’s list of cities with the worst purchasing power. Honolulu, Hawaii took the prize for that list. The average salary in paradise is $74,553, but when adjusted for the cost of living, that paycheck plummets to an average $59,882. The same is true for Miami ($69,170) and New York ($69,295), who also find themselves on the list of worst cities to stretch a dollar.
With so much growth occurring throughout the Yellowhammer State, and specifically Birmingham, these wage statistics set the Magic City apart from the rest. With such cheap, high standards of living, who wouldn’t want to live and work in Alabama’s largest city?! Besides, the people are pretty great too.
