The good news is that the Bay Area has the highest concentration of high-earning people of any United States metropolitan region. The bad news is that this is partly the case because rich people have priced so many lower-income people out of the city proper.

When we participate in the US Census, the Census-takers do keep track of respondents’ reported salaries, to calculate the median US income. (It was about $80,000 in 2023.) But those numbers are not completely reliable, as the Census does not report on the very highest salaries, to protect the highest earners from being identified.

But the payroll company ADP does factor in the very highest salaries. They just put out their annual report on the highest-paid US metropolitan areas. And the Chronicle went through the numbers and came to the unsurprising conclusion that the Bay Area has the highest concentration of millionaires of any US metro region.

“The San Francisco Bay Area, home to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, vastly outranked every other metro in terms of high-paying jobs, including those paying more than $1 million or $2 million annually,” the ADP report concludes. “About 1 in 48 Bay Area jobs paying more than $500,000 a year, nearly double the share in the second-highest region, Austin.”

Okay, our percentage of millionaires in the Bay Area is only 0.54% of the working population. But that’s still nearly twice as high as the next closest metro region, Cape Coral-Fort Myers-Naples, Florida, where 0.32% of people make more than $1 million a year.

The reason for this, of course, is the tech industry, as the broad region of Silicon Valley is counted as part of our metro region, technically described as “San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland.” The tech industry is unique among high-earning professions like doctors and lawyers. Doctors and lawyers have obvious caps on how many clients they can serve, while tech workers do not face any such productivity restraints.

But the darker side of this analysis is that we have such a high percentage of millionaires because they have priced so many of the working class people out of the Bay Area.

“Decades of skyrocketing housing prices have squeezed out low- and middle-income residents and discouraged potential newcomers,” according to the ADP analysis. “As a result, high earners account for a greater share of the [Bay Area] population than they would otherwise.”

The report cites remote work as a cause of this out-migration of lower-earning workers. While we often think of remote work as a benefit for pampered and high-earning employees, the reality is that many middle-income earners also work remotely. And those middle-income remote workers have found it makes a lot more sense to do that remote work in a place where the rent, or overall housing costs, are less damn high than they are in the SF Bay Area.

Related: Extremely Fancy Noe Valley Rich People Seek $175K Pantry Organizer [SFist]

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