With unemployment dipping as low as 3.5 percent, the Boise metro area labor market is tight, and businesses are struggling to find talented workers, often competing with other regional metro areas. For companies struggling to find skilled workers, it is worth knowing how Boise competes with other metro areas to attract and retain workers.
Source: Center for Community and Economic Research (C2ER), Cost of Living Index, 2014
Boise’s relatively low cost of living is a selling point in attracting labor, but while the capital city’s cost of living is about 6 percent lower than the national average, wages are, on average, about 10 percent lower. There is a positive correlation between a metro area’s cost of living and its median wage. The interactive graphic shows all the metro areas where data has been collected, charted against the metro’s median wage.