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High wages
Prepare to pay up for workers: These metro areas have the highest hourly wages.
Rank Metro area Average hourly wage
1 San Jose, CA $30.92
2 Washington, DC $27.44
3 San Francisco, CA $27.31
4 Bridgeport, CT $26.52
5 Boston, MA $25.81
6 Boulder, CO $25.5
7 Trenton, NJ $25.42
8 New York City, NY $25.39
9 Seattle, WA $24.21
10 Hartford, CT $24.2
11 Ann Arbor, MI $23.5
12 Durham, NC $23.48
13 Anchorage, AK $23.1
14 New Haven, CT $23.03
15 Minneapolis, MN $23.01
16 Los Angeles, CA $22.9
17 San Diego, CA $22.72
18 Denver, CO $22.67
19 Chicago, IL $22.65
20 Baltimore, MD $22.61
21 Sacramento, CA $22.59
22 Santa Rosa, CA $22.51
23 Detroit, MI $22.45
24 Fairbanks, AK $22.43
25 Oxnard, CA $22.43
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008 Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates.
Best Places Winners
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Find your launch spot
Do you prefer a place that is: Small Medium Large
The factors that matter most to me are:
 Affordable wages  Few foreclosures
 Educated workers  Low housing costs
 Low crime  High local incomes
 A growing economy  Population growth
 Growing small business population

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How we picked the Best Places
This year we partnered with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to find the 50 most business-friendly communities in America.

With help from Robert Fairlie, an economist and leading scholar of entrepreneurship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, we developed a methodology and sifted through such data on factors such as per capita income, hourly wages, workforce quality, crime rates, taxes and foreclosures. More

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