Average Wages in Silicon Valley Are Not Just 2 to 3X the National Average - They Understate Actual Compensation

Silicon Valley isn’t just paying the highest wages in the country - it’s doing it at a pace only two other places can match: King County (home to Amazon and Microsoft) and Manhattan. The numbers are eye-popping on their own, but here’s the twist: they still leave out a huge part of the story.
The wage data counts salaries and the value of stock options exercised during that quarter. That’s it. If you exercised options before or after the reporting window, or you’re sitting on unexercised options that have skyrocketed in value, none of that shows up in “income.”

So imagine an Nvidia employee in Santa Clara. The county average wage is $220K, but at a company like NVDA, pay could easily be two or three times that. Now layer on this: in the last year, Nvidia’s stock jumped about 50%. For someone holding a lot of shares or unexercised options, that wealth increase could equal - or exceed -their annual wage.

(Recent reporting suggests that about 80% of NVDA employees are now millionaires and about 50% are worth $25 million or more.)*

Which means the headline story (“Silicon Valley workers make 2–3x the national average”) actually understates their total compensation. For many, the real number - their salary plus stock wealth - makes the income gap between tech hubs and the rest of America even wider than most people realize.

raw data:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewqtr.t01.htm

source for portion of NVDA employees worth $25 million or more 
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/nvidia-employees-net-worth-wealth-created-inside-nvidia-reach-stunning-levels-nearly-80-of-employees-are-millionaires/articleshow/123143042.cms