Washington, DC Metro Area Pay Trends
Updated April 5, 2012
2012: Similar to some of the other metros, wage levels hit a bit of snag in the nation’s capital in Q1 2012. Nearly 0.5 percent below the previous quarter, strong growth from 2011 still kept wage levels about 1.5 percent above Q1 2010.
2007-2011: D.C. is really composed of two markets: federal government workers, many of whom are recruited nationally and suffered few or no layoffs early in the recession, and everyone else. The private industry labor force in D.C. (a.k.a. everyone else), which is the only group tracked by The PayScale Index, felt the effects of the recession.
In 2007 and 2008, workers’ incomes in Washington, D.C. rose steadily. Then, like the rest of the country, D.C. saw a reduction in the market price of private industry workers in early 2009. Wages rebounded from this drop a bit in 2009, and during 2010 wages recovered somewhat. In 2011, wages rose beyond their pre-recession peak, heading toward more typical 3-percent-per-year growth levels.
