Jobs

You'll have almost zero competition to land a ‘highly paid' job in these 10 cities

John Elk | The Image Bank | Getty Images

If you're looking for a six-figure job with virtually zero competition, you might consider finding a gig in Sitka, Alaska.

It's the No. 4 city with the least amount of competition to land a "highly paid" job, according to a new analysis from Career.io, a career management platform.

The site identified the cities with the lowest rates of people applying for highly paid jobs, defined as double the local average wage, based on LinkedIn and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The analysis considers in-person jobs in the country's 200 largest cities by population, plus the five largest cities in each state.

In each of the top 10 cities with low competition, virtually zero applicants applied to high-paying vacancies every day.

That makes sense in small towns like No. 1 Parkersburg, W.V., which has a population of under 30,000, according to the Census Bureau. But even in No. 19 Toledo, Ohio, among the biggest least competitive towns with some 269,000 residents, barely one person applies to a highly paid job there every day, on average.

Here are the cities with the least competition for highly paid jobs:

  1. Parkersburg, West Virginia: high-salary jobs pay $72,051 or more
  2. Nampa, Idaho: high-salary jobs pay $83,200 or more
  3. Butte, Montana: high-salary jobs pay $86,154 or more
  4. Sitka, Alaska: high-salary jobs pay $106,496 or more
  5. Grand Island, Nebraska: high-salary jobs pay $83,574 or more
  6. Kearney, Nebraska: high-salary jobs pay $78,333 or more
  7. Dover, New Hampshire: high-salary jobs pay $81,702 or more
  8. Laredo, Texas: high-salary jobs pay$66,269 or more
  9. Morgantown, West Virginia: high-salary jobs pay $80,163 or more
  10. Olathe, Kansas: high-salary jobs pay $92,809 or more

It's not that these places don't have high-paying opportunities.

"The salaries of the high-paying jobs are relative to the median salaries in each state or city, so the competition rates are more reflective of a lack of candidates rather than it being a lower-paying market," says Taylor Tomita, senior outreach specialist at NeoMam Studios, a creative marketing agency that works with Career.io.

Parkersburg, for example, had 52 high-paying job listings at the time of the analysis, "but there were absolutely no applications submitted to these roles," Tomita says. In general, the most common highly paid but not competitive jobs are in health care and sales. The top cities with low competition in the job market have a higher share of these vacancies.

On the flip side, the most competitive place to land a highly paid job is Salt Lake City, where every highly paid open job (defined as a salary over $94,515) received roughly 35 applicants every day. Several inland cities, including St. Louis and Denver, showed fiercer competition on the high-paying job market over coastal cities including San Francisco (No. 6), Los Angeles (No. 8) and New York (No. 10).

Want to land your dream job in 2024? Take CNBC's new online course How to Ace Your Job Interview to learn what hiring managers are really looking for, body language techniques, what to say and not to say, and the best way to talk about pay.

Copyright CNBC
Contact Us