Overview

In Philadelphia, an inclusive economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic will require a robust increase in jobs—particularly in what economists call “middle-wage jobs,” positions that pay enough to sustain a family and that have historically been available to people without college degrees.

The Pew Charitable Trusts recently researched the pandemic’s impact on the city’s economy and found that job losses sustained in Philadelphia were heavily concentrated in industry sectors that pay low and middle wages—and those losses hit Black, female, and non-college-educated workers the hardest.¹ In addition, employment locally continues to recover more slowly than nationally, with the number of jobs in the city still well below pre-pandemic levels as of July 2022.²

Pew has defined middle-wage jobs as those paying within 20% of the median city wage—that is, from $18.61 to $27.92 per hour as of 2019, or roughly $39,000 to $58,000 annually.³ By that definition, about 145,000 people who work in Philadelphia, or 23% of the city’s workforce, held middle-wage jobs during the five-year period leading up to the pandemic.

To help local policymakers and civic leaders keep a close eye on the middle of the wage distribution, this issue brief details the specific occupations paying middle wages in Philadelphia, explores their growth prospects, and compares Philadelphia’s performance with that of five other cities and their broader metropolitan areas: Baltimore, Nashville, New York, San Francisco, and Washington. These comparison cities were selected because they share characteristics with Philadelphia and have municipal boundaries compatible with the methodology used for this analysis.

Among the key findings of the research:

• Occupations paying middle wages in Philadelphia vary widely, but the largest number are in office and administrative support, including customer service representatives, administrative assistants, and office clerks. However, recent trends in Philadelphia, which mirror national projections, point toward continued job losses for that group.
• Occupations with high growth projections in Philadelphia that already provide substantial quantities of middle-wage jobs are in health care support and community and social service.
• In Philadelphia, the strongest recent middle-wage job growth has been in educational instruction, management, construction, and health care support jobs.
• Philadelphia has fewer middle-wage jobs compared with the overall size of its workforce, making those jobs harder to find in this city than in the comparison cities.
• In addition, middle-wage jobs are less common in Philadelphia simply because the city has comparatively few jobs overall. Among the six cities studied in this report, Philadelphia is the only one with a lower number of jobs per capita than its metropolitan area overall.
• Middle-wage job growth relies on overall job growth, not on specific sectors. Different economic sectors employ middle-wage workers at roughly similar rates. For that reason, changing the sector mix may not substantially increase the number of middle-wage jobs.

The occupations in Philadelphia that pay middle wages

One can look at middle-wage jobs by industry sectors or by occupations.

Figure 1 looks at job categories in Philadelphia, with the length of the bar showing the number of middle-wage jobs in each category and the percentage indicating the share of jobs in each category that pay middle wages.

The largest number of jobs, 24,590, are in office and administrative support, followed by management, and then educational instruction and library—primarily teaching jobs.

Of the occupation categories that provide the largest number of middle-wage jobs, positions in office and administrative support and community and social service were most likely to pay middle wages, at 35% and 40% of workers, respectively. Other categories—including positions held by health care practitioners and technical workers (17%), and food preparation and serving-related jobs (14%)—were among the least likely to pay middle wages.

In some job categories, Philadelphia residents, as opposed to commuters, made up a disproportionate share of middle-wage earners. Although residents accounted for 67% of the city’s middle-wage workers overall, they made up 82% of workers earning middle wages in health care support professions, 78% among protective service workers and movers, 76% among food preparers, and 75% among community and social service workers.

Within those categories, elementary and middle school teachers, customer service representatives, and secretaries and administrative assistants accounted for the largest number of middle-wage workers. (See Table 1, which also shows the 25 occupations that employ the most middle-wage workers in Philadelphia and the percentage of jobs in each occupation that pay middle wages.)

A few occupations stand out for paying middle wages to a particularly high proportion of their workers, including social workers, human resources workers, and bookkeeping and accounting clerks.⁴ The share of middle-wage earners who live in the city varies by job title, but residents make up a highly disproportionate share of social workers and nursing assistants. For these percentages, the margins of error are relatively high, sometimes in the double digits. In the case of the 43% figure for middle-wage jobs among bookkeeping and accounting clerks, for instance, the margin is plus or minus 12%, meaning that the actual figure could be as low as 31% or as high as 55%.

Table 1

The Most Common Occupations Among Middle-Wage Workers in Philadelphia

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Public Use Microdata Sample, American Community Survey, five-year estimates, 2015-19

Note: In some categories, such as physicians and registered nurses, most of the jobs not classified as middle wage are higher-wage positions. In other categories, such as retail salespersons and janitors and building cleaners, most jobs pay lower wages.

Trends over time in Philadelphia’s middle-wage occupations

In the decade before the pandemic, the biggest losses in the number of middle-wage workers in Philadelphia were in office and administrative support, and in production. (See Figure 2.) The strongest growth was in educational instruction and library, management, construction, and health care support. 

Those recent changes are consistent with national projections for employment trends over the next decade and could portend substantial additional losses of middle-wage jobs in Philadelphia.⁵ The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that office and administrative support occupations, which provide an outsize share of middle-wage jobs in Philadelphia, will have the largest loss in employment (-2.8%) of any job category by 2030. And production occupations, which have been hit hard in the city, are projected to have the third-largest percentage loss, at -0.4%.⁶ Pairing these results and projections with occupational research tools such as the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s Occupational Mobility Explorer⁷ may help inform workforce development efforts to create pathways from declining middle-wage occupations to growing ones.

Long-term factors also are expected to favor overall job growth in the following occupations: health care support (23.1%), computer and mathematical (14.1%), and community and social service (12.4%). Of those, community and social service and health care support are substantial providers of middle-wage jobs in Philadelphia, and both are heavily weighted toward city residents.

How Philadelphia’s middle-wage employment compares with that of peer cities

How does middle-wage employment in Philadelphia compare with the situation in other cities and in the region overall, and what does that say about the potential to add more of those types of jobs?

In the peer cities, the percentage of workers earning middle wages is relatively consistent, ranging from a low of about 20% in New York and San Francisco to a high of just under 25% in Baltimore and Nashville. (See Figure 3.)

But there are relatively fewer of those jobs in Philadelphia compared with the size of the working-age population in each city. By that measure, Philadelphia is second from the bottom among the comparison cities, ahead only of New York. (See Figure 4.) In a city such as Philadelphia, where 18% of workers lack access to a vehicle and where public transit service is much stronger within the city’s boundaries, that lack of nearby employment options is especially challenging.

The relative lack of those jobs in Philadelphia is largely the result of there being fewer jobs overall. A key factor contributing to that is the decentralization of jobs in the region. Among the other cities in this analysis, Philadelphia is the only one that has fewer jobs per resident than its region overall. (See Figure 5.) Washington, at the other end of the spectrum, has more than twice as many jobs per resident as its metropolitan area. This job decentralization in the Philadelphia region also has important consequences for city tax revenue, which recent Pew research has shown to be highly dependent on the concentration of employment in the city, and therefore highly volatile in the wake of the pandemic.⁸

Another factor contributing to the low concentration of middle-wage jobs in Philadelphia is the relatively low number of jobs in the region overall. The region has the lowest level of job availability among the group, with 758 jobs per 1,000 working-age residents, compared with a peer region average of 793.

Prospects for increasing the number of middle-wage jobs in Philadelphia

What are the opportunities for adding middle-wage jobs in Philadelphia? Do some industry sectors provide large numbers of middle-wage jobs in other cities, while Philadelphia lags? To answer that question, Pew examined the composition of the economy in each city.

The analysis suggests that focusing economic development strategies on particular sectors is not likely to produce a substantial number of new middle-wage jobs in the city. That’s because the share of workers who earn middle wages does not differ enormously among sectors, ranging from a peer city average of roughly 18% in retail trade to 27% in educational services and public administration—with most sectors clustered somewhere in the middle. Instead, the number of middle-wage jobs produced by a given sector is mostly determined by the sector’s size.

This could make it hard for a city like Philadelphia to grow its middle-wage jobs by changing the economy’s sector mix.

Conclusion

This detailed data on Philadelphia’s occupational landscape provides a key benchmark for policymakers focused on middle-wage job growth, including workforce training to help workers transition into growing job categories. It also identifies vulnerable jobs and the occupations that put city residents most at risk of job loss. This information is important because middle-wage employment in Philadelphia lags five peer cities. For a Philadelphia resident looking for a living-wage job, this means that there are fewer options available locally than elsewhere.

What policymakers can do about this is not entirely clear. A deeper dive into the composition of middle-wage employment among peer cities suggests that creating middle-wage job growth by targeting specific industries is challenging. To increase middle-wage opportunities, a key priority may simply be increasing the number of jobs in the city and the region—although, it should be noted, overall job growth did not result in significantly more middle-wage jobs in Philadelphia in the 2010s. And it’s vital that officials monitor the data as they attempt to ensure that the city’s pandemic recovery does not result in stagnation for these critical family-sustaining jobs.

About this brief

This brief was written by Seth Budick, senior officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative. Pew senior officer Sandra Shea edited the brief, along with Elizabeth Lowe, Erika Compart, and Matthew Moser. 

The brief benefited from the comments of two independent reviewers: Matthew Hutton, senior research analyst on Philadelphia Works’ data performance and labor market information team, and a second reviewer who preferred not to be identified. This analysis does not necessarily reflect the opinions of these reviewers or their institutions.

Endnotes

1. The Pew Charitable Trusts, “How the Pandemic Has Affected Philadelphia’s Economy and Jobs” (2022), https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2022/02/how-the-pandemic-has-affected-philadelphias-economy-and-jobs.
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “State and Area Employment, Hours, and Earnings,” accessed Sept. 27, 2022, https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/dsrv.
3. The Pew Charitable Trusts, “What’s Happening With Philadelphia’s Middle-Wage Jobs?” (2021), https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2021/04/whats-happening-with-philadelphias-middle-wage-jobs.
4. Note that for the occupations in Table 1, the margin of error for the percentage of jobs paying middle wages ranged from 2% to 12%, and the share of middle-wage jobs held by city residents ranged from 6% to 20%.
5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Projections,” accessed April 25, 2022, https://www.bls.gov/emp/data/occupational-data.htm.
6. These results align closely with projections by Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor and Industry for the Philadelphia Metropolitan Statistical Area, Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry Center for Workforce Information and Analysis, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington MSA (PA Counties Only): Occupational Employment—2018-2028 Long-Term Projections, accessed June 6, 2022, https://www.workstats.dli.pa.gov/Documents/Projections/Occupational/MSA/PhilaNJmsa_LTOP.xlsx.
7. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, “Occupational Mobility Explorer,” accessed April 25, 2022, https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/community-development-data/occupational-mobility-explorer.
8. The Pew Charitable Trusts, “How the Pandemic Has Affected Philadelphia’s Economy and Jobs.”