2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Released

By Dr. Bryan Grady, Assistant Executive Director

On May 15, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published data on employment and wages by occupation – namely, Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes – for the nation, states, metropolitan statistical areas, and nonmetropolitan areas for 2025. The work of developing these estimates is done in part by a team of four employees housed within the Labor Market Information (LMI) Division, soliciting information from employers to ensure that our state has the most complete and accurate data available. If your business is one that responded, we very much appreciate your time and effort in doing so.

As of last May, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey reported 2,305,080 jobs in South Carolina; the average hourly wage was $28.50. This comes out to $59,280 per year, assuming that someone is working 40 hours per week for all 52 weeks. The data for the broadest categories of occupations, which are represented by the two-digit SOC codes, are available below:

Management occupations have the highest average hourly wage (AHW) at $62.02, while food preparation jobs have the lowest at $14.76. The last column features the Location Quotient (LQ), which demonstrates the concentration of jobs within that group relative to the national average. For example, production has the highest LQ at 1.41; this means there are 41 percent more production jobs per capita in South Carolina than nationwide.

Which specific jobs pay the most? It turns out that the 20 highest paid occupations are all situated in SOC 29, the healthcare practitioners and technical group. It’s worth noting that 19 of these jobs require a doctoral degree plus residency, which represents at least a decade of postsecondary training. The one exception is nurse anesthetists, for which a master’s degree represents sufficient education.

Note: N/A means that an estimate is not available. N/C means that an average hourly wage estimate was not calculated, but that it is at least $115.00.

And what about those location quotients? Which jobs are the ones that South Carolina specializes in most? As it happens, they are overwhelmingly concentrated in two groups: textile workers and nuclear energy workers. Nine of the ten highest LQs fall into one of these two categories. While the textile industry is not what it once was, South Carolina is still home to many such operations, and our nuclear workforce is quite large thanks to generating the third-most atomic energy of any state plus the prominence of the Savannah River Site.

In future articles, we’ll do a deeper dive into regional data and occupations of interest, so be sure to check back with LMI Insights. For more information, check out the OEWS page on the BLS website at https://bls.gov/oes/.

To help put these data into context, feel free to reach out to our Workforce Insights Analysts! Email us at lmicustomerservice@dew.sc.gov with whatever questions you may have.