Kitsap County workers earned nearly $1.50 less an hour than the average Washington worker in 2013.
But they were $1.26
better off than employees across the U.S.
The county also employed a disproportionately high number of marine architects and engineers.
Those were a few takeaways from fresh local wage data released by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics last week. The detailed numbers, available for perusal online, estimate wages across all industries for May of 2013.
According to BLS, the average hourly wage in Kitsap was $23.59. The national average was $22.33. That’s a 6 percent difference.
The state average was $25.04, buoyed by the whopping $27.46 earned by Seattle/Tacoma/Everett workers.
Here’s a look at how Kitsap wages stacked up across the region (you can wave your clicker over any of these charts to see exact numbers):
What fields employed the most workers in the county in 2013? And how well did those jobs pay? This chart answers those questions:
Now, about those maritime professions. It’s not surprising Kitsap employs a large number of marine engineers and architects, given the presence of the Naval shipyard and private boat builders.
Still, it was neat to see Kitsap had the highest concentration
of those professionals in the country. About 1.96 out of every
1,000 jobs in the county are in marine architecture and engineering
(i.e. if 1,000 Kitsap workers were stranded on a desert island, two
would probably know how to design and build a ship).
