Does work in New York pay enough to live on? We launched the Cornell ILR Wage Atlas in 2023 to answer that question for every part of the state, and we last updated it in February 2024. Today we’re releasing a rebuilt Atlas with newer data, new views and the same purpose: to show partners in government, labor and the nonprofit sector who earns a living wage and who doesn’t.
What’s in it
The Atlas covers about 10.5 million working New Yorkers, drawn from roughly 506,000 responses to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2020 to 2024. For each worker, it estimates hourly pay in 2025 dollars and compares it with the living wage from MIT’s Living Wage Calculator for the worker’s county and family: how many adults live in the household, how many of them work, and how many children they’re raising.
Results are available for the state, its ten economic development regions and all 144 of its Public Use Microdata Areas, the smallest areas the Census Bureau publishes these survey records for. Each is home to at least 100,000 people.
How to use it
The Atlas has seven views, listed across the top of the page.
- Wages shows what workers earn per hour: the median and the middle half of the pay range for every occupation, with a map of median pay. The occupation table can also show how exposed each job is to AI, from two research measures.
- Living wage shows the share of workers who earn at least the living wage for their family type, mapped across the state and broken down by 14 traits, from race and ethnicity to parent status and education.
- Industries ranks industries by the share of their workers paid below a living wage.
- Minimum wage profiles the workers who earn the state minimum wage or less.
- Simulator lets you set a new statewide minimum wage and see how many workers would get a raise, how much more they would earn in a year, and how the share earning a living wage would change.
- Calculator estimates the chance that a worker with the profile you choose, such as their region, industry, family and education, earns a living wage.
- About explains the data and methods.
A few tips. Use the filters above the maps to narrow them to a region or to a group of workers by sex, race and ethnicity or education. Select any area on a map to focus every number on that area, and clear it with the ✕ beside its name. On every map, a darker shade means a higher value, and each map can be switched to a table. Every number is an estimate from a survey sample, so the Atlas shows margins of error and tells you when a group has too few survey responses for a reliable estimate.
What it shows
Just over half of workers earn a living wage. Statewide, 52.8% of workers earn at least the living wage for their family type, and 57.8% of full-time workers do. That leaves about 4.9 million working New Yorkers short.
Place matters, down to the neighborhood. The Capital Region has the highest share (59.3%), and the North Country (49.1%) and New York City (49.5%) have the lowest. The differences within regions are wider than the differences between them. In New York City, the share ranges from 29% in the Bronx’s Morrisania, Tremont, Belmont and West Farms to 76% in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. In Western New York, where 56.9% of workers earn a living wage, it ranges from 43% on Buffalo’s East Side to 66% in northeastern Erie County.
Children are the sharpest dividing line. Six in ten workers in households without children (60.0%) earn a living wage, compared with 43.8% of those raising one child, 41.7% of those raising two and 27.3% of those raising three or more. Single parents fare worst: about one in five (20.6%) earns a living wage, compared with two in three workers in couples without children (66.6%). The costs of raising children, child care above all, raise the living wage a family needs much faster than they raise pay.
Industry and occupation. Just over a quarter of workers in accommodation and food services (26.4%) earn a living wage, compared with more than three in four in finance and insurance (77.3%) and in utilities (77.8%). Among occupations, food preparation and serving workers (23.7%) and health care support workers, including home health and personal care aides (24.9%), are the least likely to earn one.
Race, ethnicity and gender. 60.9% of White workers earn a living wage, compared with 50.5% of Asian or Pacific Islander workers, 42.6% of Black workers and 37.3% of Hispanic or Latinx workers. Half of women (50.0%) earn a living wage, compared with 55.5% of men.
Education helps, but it isn’t a guarantee. Three in four workers with a graduate degree (76.3%) earn a living wage, compared with one in four without a high school diploma (24.6%). A third of workers with a four-year degree (33.6%) still fall short.
The jobs least exposed to AI pay the least. Among workers in the occupations least exposed to AI, 35.8% earn a living wage, compared with 64.7% of workers in the most exposed occupations.
A higher minimum wage helps, but it can’t close the gap alone. By the Atlas’s estimate, about one in five workers (20.6%, or about 2.2 million people) earned the 2025 state minimum wage or less: $16.50 an hour in New York City, Long Island and Westchester and $15.50 elsewhere. In the Simulator, a $20 statewide minimum would raise pay for about 3.2 million workers and add about $34 billion a year in earnings, yet the share earning a living wage would rise only from 52.8% to 56.1%. Even a $25 minimum would leave a third of workers short of a living wage for their family. A minimum wage is one number for everyone, while a living wage depends on the family a paycheck supports.
Tell us what you find
These are a few starting points. Open the Atlas, find your county or your neighborhood, and see how your community compares. If you use it in your work, or there’s something you’d like it to do, let us know.