Manhattan tops U.S. salaries at $2,821 per week

updated 8 minutes ago

NEW YORK (Reuters) - At $2,821 per week, people in Manhattan earned three times the average U.S. wage in the first quarter of this year, boosted by financial sector bonuses, government statistics showed on Monday.

Equivalent to nearly $147,000 per year, average weekly pay for Manhattan residents shot up 16.7 percent from the same period of 2006, maintaining its spot as the wealthiest county in the United States.

Nationally, the average rise was 5.1 percent to $885 per week, or $46,000 per year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

People in Manhattan, home to Wall Street, earned three to four times more than their neighbors in other New York City boroughs and almost five times more than workers in the state of Montana.

Manhattanites in the financial activities supersector made an average of $10,156 per week, or about $528,000 per year, largely because year-end bonuses and commissions are paid in the first quarter, the bureau said in a news release.

Manhattan far outpaced the average wage in the boroughs of Queens ($831), the Bronx ($788), Brooklyn ($742) and Staten Island ($733), partially explaining its gentrification and economic discrepancies with the rest of New York City.

After Manhattan, the country's top-ranked counties in the first quarter were Fairfield, Connecticut, a New York City suburb, at $1,979, followed by Suffolk, Massachusetts, which includes Boston, at $1,659, and San Francisco at $1,639.

Four of the 10 counties with the highest average wages were in the New York area, while three others were in and around San Francisco, near the Silicon Valley high-technology corridor.

Among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, the capital Washington ranked first at $1,428 per week, followed by New York state at $1,397, Connecticut at $1,263, Massachusetts at $1,110 and New Jersey at $1,097.

The lowest weekly wages were in Montana ($600), South Dakota ($602), North Dakota ($615) and Mississippi ($616).

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by John O'Callaghan)

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