As college graduation parties wind down, new degree-holders are embarking on their next path: deciding where to work. A competitive salary in a bustling metropolitan hub might be tempting. But as we wrote last year, the true value of a paycheck depends on more than just the number on an offer letter. And before you can spend those dollars, you need to land the job.
For recent graduates, a thoughtful job search starts with four questions:
- How strong is the job market for college graduates like me, and how does it compare to occupations that don’t require my degree?
- Where will my starting salary go the farthest based on the local cost of living?
- Where am I more likely to get hired?
- Where can I find the best combination of wages, affordability, and robust hiring?
To help answer these questions, we turned to the anonymized ADP payroll data of more than 140,000 people aged 20 to 29 at over 27,000 U.S. employers. We looked at their data from January 2019 through April 2025. Then we looked at 55 U.S. metro areas with at least one million residents, ranking them by annual wages, hiring rates, and affordability.
For the second year, we found big differences from city to city. But our top metro for graduates didn’t change: Raleigh, North Carolina, once again claimed the top spot.
Here’s how U.S. metros stacked up
The 55 metros we observed had a hiring rate ranging from 1.8 percent in Salt Lake City to 4.2 percent in Raleigh, N.C. More than half had a hiring rate of more than 2.5 percent.
Raleigh holds its crown
Once again, Raleigh claimed the top spot. North Carolina’s Research Triangle region consistently draws an influx of people attracted by its job opportunities, comparatively affordable cost of living, and strong hiring.
Atlanta, which ranked 94th in the combined percentile rank in 2024, dropped 70 places after its hiring rate fell to 2.2 percent.
The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, region rose to 98th place from 56th, leaping over greater Baltimore, Maryland, and Austin, Texas, after its hiring rate jumped from 2.3 percent to 3.7 percent.
These four metros rank the lowest overall
The greater Virginia Beach and Norfolk region was ranked the second-worst for graduates last year. Regrettably, it sank even lower this year, finishing at the bottom of our percentile rankings.
Salt Lake City, Utah, which was in the bottom 10 metros for new graduates last year, also lost ground after it recorded the lowest hiring rate of all our metros, down from 2.1 percent to 1.8 percent this year.
Hartford, Connecticut, too, lost ground. Its hiring rate slowed by a basis point to 1.9 percent with little improvement in wages or affordability.
Fresno, California, and New Orleans both escaped the bottom four after their hiring rates improved.
Biggest movers
As we’ve mentioned, most metros didn’t lose or gain a lot of ground from last year. But many did. The biggest mover up in the ranks was greater Phoenix, Arizona, which rose from a percentile rank of 20 in 2024 to 87 in 2025. This was powered by an increase in both median annual wages, from $47,840 to $49,252, and the hiring rate, from 2.3 percent to 2.9 percent.
Losing the most ground was greater Atlanta, which fell from the 94th percentile rank to 24th. Wages increased by just $918 and hiring rates fell from 2.9 percent to 2.2 percent.
Setting priorities
While our goal is to recognize metros that provide a strong mix of wages, cost of living, and employment opportunities, some graduates might prioritize job availability over potential earnings. To that end, we pinpointed four metropolitan areas with promising hiring prospects.
The Louisville metropolitan area, which includes Jefferson County in Kentucky and surrounding counties in both Kentucky and Indiana, made this list last year. While the region still has robust hiring and affordability compared to other metros, its hiring rate fell from 2.7 percent to 2.4 percent.
Detroit’s hiring rate continues to be strong, but when it comes to job availability, it was bumped this year by Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hiring rate improved from 2.4 percent to 2.6 percent, and the affordability-adjusted median annual wage rose.
And some graduates might put pay at the top of their priority list. Metros with high wages but lower hiring rates illustrate the tradeoff that these graduates might face.
In Seattle, for example, the median wage increased by just over $2,000 to $58,225, but its hiring rate remained relatively low at 2.2 percent.
New York’s annual median wage rose from $60,000 to $61,154, but its hiring rate dropped from 2.6 percent to 2.5 percent.
Both Seattle and New York median wages are significantly higher than the median wages for all observed metros at $49,252. (The average national metro wage is $50,033.)
Looking for your next move? Explore metro-level wages, affordability, and hiring for yourself.
Methodology
How we find likely college graduates in payroll data
Payroll data doesn’t tell us the educational attainment of workers. To fill that gap, we map worker job titles to the Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) Job Zones, which measure the education, experience, and training that jobs require.1ADP uses a proprietary algorithm to map the job titles that employers enter into the payroll system to their most likely O*NET-SOC (Standard Occupational Classification) codes, which O*NET categories by Job Zone.
Occupations fall into one of five Job Zones, each with its own typical education requirements.
| Job Zone | Job Zone name | Typical education requirement |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Little or no preparation | Might require a high school diploma or GED |
| 2 | Some preparation | Usually require a high school diploma |
| 3 | Medium preparation | Require a vocational school or associate’s degree |
| 4 | Considerable preparation | Most require a bachelor’s degree |
| 5 | Extensive preparation | Most require graduate school |
How we compare metro areas
We looked at 55 U.S. metro areas with at least one million residents and compared them on three characteristics:
- Annual wages– For the 12 months ending in April 2025, we used ADP data to estimate median annualized wages each month for workers ages 20 to 29 in jobs requiring considerable preparation. We calculated the median of those medians by metro area.
- Hiring rates– Each month, we counted the number of people aged 20 to 29 who were hired in the previous 12 months into jobs requiring considerable preparation, typically a bachelor’s degree, and the number of people in that same group who were employed in those jobs during the same period. We divided hires by employment. The result gives us the rate at which employers grew their considerably-prepared headcount aged 20 to 29 each month. We present the result as a percentage, which gives the rate per 100 people employed for a full month.23 More specifically, this hiring rate estimates the number of hires per 100 worker-months, where a worker-month is defined as the number of months or partial months that workers collectively are employed. In our estimate, the denominator of this rate is the number of workers employed for any length of time during the month. More precise and accurate measure of the hiring rate would have accounted for the fraction of the month a worker was employed during each month rather than giving each worker the same weight regardless of how many days in the month they worked. We are confident that the trends highlighted in this post would be robust to alternative methods.
- Affordability– The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis divides a metro area’s consumer price index by the national cost index to measure metro area regional price parity (MARPP). The higher the MARPP, the more expensive the metro area relative to the national average.3Metro areas here are defined as Core-Based Statistical Areas. We report results for CBSAs with at least one million residents as of 2022 five-year American Community Survey total population estimates. To measure affordability, we take the inverse of MARPP.4Affordability = 1/MARPP. To adjust wages for the cost of living, we divide the metro area’s wages by MARPP.
To make wages, hiring rates, and affordability comparable despite different units of measurement, we calculated the percentile rank of each metro on each metric, which takes a number between zero and 100. The higher the percentile ranking, the better the metro performs on that metric. For example, a metro with a hiring rate percentile ranking of 65 percent has better hiring than 65 percent of the metros studied.
To combine wage, affordability, and hiring performance into a single ranking metric, we first take the average of each metro area’s affordability-adjusted wages and hiring rate.5Specifically, we take the geometric mean, which leads a 1 percent decline in affordability-adjusted wages to have the same impact on a metro area’s average score as a 1 percent decline in the hiring rate, despite their different scales. Second, we take the percentile rank of each metro on that average.
