SEATTLE (AP) — Washington state, home to Microsoft, Amazon.com, and other high-technology success stories, is tops in the nation when it comes to the average wages for high-tech workers, a new study says. A big reason is the value of stock options granted to Microsoft and other software and Internet companies.
The report by the American Electronics Association says the average high-tech wage in Washington in 1997 was $81,375, compared with $62,771 in second-place California. The national average was $53,145.
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”The stock options within Microsoft certainly become a driving factor in pushing that average up,” said Dennis Fusco, chief economist for the state Employment Security Department. “I would assume that is why Washington ranks so much higher than the other states.”
New Jersey ranked third, with an average high-tech wage of $62,589; the District of Columbia was fourth at $61,862; and Massachusetts was fifth at $59,622.
In terms of the number of workers in the industry, California was tops with 784,151, followed by Texas, 375,933; New York, 320,410; Illinois, 207,201; and Massachusetts, 205,901. Washington ranked 16th, with 97,025.
Washington has “a concentration of software companies up there that classically pay more money than other computer companies,” said John Hatch of the association’s Silicon Valley office in California.
Redmond-based Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, said last month that it planned to boost employee pay to retain workers. The company had been paying workers at about the 50th percentile for the industry, and said it would raise that to the 65th percentile.
But it is its stock options that have turned thousands of Microsoft employees into millionaires.
The average compensation — including stock options exercised — in the pre-packaged software industry in Washington was $158,000 in 1997, the report says.
Fusco puts the figure even higher, at $197,878.
For all private-sector jobs in Washington, the average was far lower: $30,337, the report says.
The association report uses figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and looks at three broad categories: high-tech manufacturing, software services and communication services.
The report also found:
High-tech companies employ 47 of every 1,000 private-sector workers in Washington, and high-tech products account for $3.3 billion of the state’s $41.8 billion in exports.
Nationwide, about 1 million high-tech jobs were added from 1993 to 1997, for a total of 4.8 million.
