What is a good hourly wage?

"Good" is not a number. But there are four benchmarks that will tell you far more than a gut feeling.

Nobody can answer this for you in the abstract, and anyone who gives you a single national number is selling something. $22 an hour is a comfortable wage in parts of the Midwest and an unlivable one in San Francisco. The honest answer requires four comparisons — and most people have never made any of them.

Benchmark 1: the national median

Start with the widest possible frame. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (May 2025, the most recent full release), the median hourly wage across all U.S. occupations is $24.51. The mean is higher, at $33.54, and the mean annual wage is $69,770.

Pay attention to the gap between those two numbers, because it tells you something. The mean is dragged upward by very high earners; the median is the actual middle of the pack. When someone quotes an "average wage" of $33, they are describing a distribution, not a typical person. The median — $24.51 — is the number to measure yourself against.

So the crudest possible answer: if you earn more than about $24.50 an hour, you are paid above the middle of the American workforce. That works out to roughly $51,000 a year at full time.

But that's a starting point, not a verdict.

Benchmark 2: your occupation, not the country

A median across all jobs lumps a cardiac surgeon in with a parking attendant. It's nearly useless for judging your own rate.

What you actually want is the median for your occupation, which BLS publishes free at bls.gov/oes for about 830 occupations. This is genuinely the single most valuable thing in this article. It is public, it's free, it's not crowdsourced, and almost nobody looks at it before a salary conversation.

The distribution matters as much as the midpoint. BLS gives you the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles for each job. If you're sitting at the 25th percentile for your occupation, that's a concrete, defensible fact to bring to a raise conversation — far stronger than "I feel underpaid."

Benchmark 3: where you live

This is the one that overturns everything. The same job pays wildly different rates by metro, and costs wildly different amounts to live in.

BLS publishes the same occupational data by state and metropolitan area. Look up your own metro. A rate that looks generous nationally can be below-market locally, and the reverse is just as common — a "low" wage in a cheap area can leave you with more money at the end of the month than a high one in an expensive city.

The test that actually matters isn't your rate. It's what's left after housing. A widely used rule of thumb says housing should stay under 30% of gross income. Take your hourly rate, convert it to a monthly figure in the calculator, and compare 30% of that against what a place near your work actually rents for. If those numbers don't meet, your wage isn't good — regardless of what the national median says.

Benchmark 4: the floor

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009 — more than fifteen years without an increase. Most states now set a higher floor, and many cities set higher ones still.

The minimum is a useful reference point mainly for perspective. At the national median of $24.51, you're earning about 3.4× the federal minimum. A $15 wage — long treated as an aspirational target — is about 2× the federal floor and still meaningfully below the national median. That's worth sitting with.

The rough map

Measured against the $24.51 national median, in very broad strokes:

Treat this as orientation, not judgment. A $20 wage in rural Ohio with employer-paid health insurance may leave you better off than $32 in Seattle with a high-deductible plan.

What people forget to count

Two workers on identical rates can be paid very differently:

• Health insurance. An employer covering the bulk of a family premium is contributing thousands of dollars a year that never appear in your hourly rate.
• Retirement matching. A 4% match on a $50,000 salary is $2,000 a year of free money — effectively about $0.96 an hour.
• Guaranteed hours. $25 an hour for a reliable 40 beats $28 for an unpredictable 25–35. Variable scheduling is a pay cut nobody puts in writing.
• Overtime access. If you're non-exempt and the hours are there, time-and-a-half changes the arithmetic substantially.
• Unreimbursed costs. Your own vehicle, your own tools, your own uniform. Every dollar you spend to do the job comes straight off your real rate.

So — is your wage good?

Run this in order:

1. Look up your occupation's median in your metro on bls.gov/oes.
2. See which percentile you land in.
3. Check whether 30% of your monthly pay covers realistic local housing.
4. Add back the benefits, and subtract what the job costs you to do.

If you're above your local occupational median, housed comfortably, and covered on health and retirement, you're doing well — whatever the number on the paycheck says. If you're below the 25th percentile for your own job in your own city, you have a factual case for a raise. Here's how to make it.

Wage figures are from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, May 2025 release — the most recent available. BLS updates annually.

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