Third Quarter 2024: Wage Growth in Many Industries, Job Growth Concentrated in Health Care and Social Assistance
June 18, 2025Oregon had 2.04 million people working in jobs covered by the state’s unemployment insurance system during the third quarter of 2024. This was a decrease of 9,500, or -0.5%, from the same quarter of the previous year. They earned a total of $33.7 billion, with an average wage of about $16,500 per worker for the quarter. The median hourly wage during the quarter was $27.48.
Most Industries Experienced Wage Growth
Oregon employers reported over 2.2 million jobs during the third quarter of 2024. The vast majority of Oregonians (89.2%) held one job during the quarter. Approximately 9.3% of workers in the third quarter of 2024 held two jobs, 1.2% of workers held three jobs, and 0.3% of workers held four or more jobs. This is similar to a year ago in the third quarter of 2023.
Meanwhile, the median wage increased by $0.24 over the year, after being adjusted for inflation according to the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). Inflation has slowed in the past year, and more industry wages have been able to keep up in their real purchasing power.
Thirteen industries had real wage gains, meaning that the median wage increased more than inflation. Construction had the largest real gain in median wage growth from third quarter 2023 to third quarter 2024 ($1.35; 3.9%). However, two industries had decreases in real median wage: information, and health care and social assistance. Health care and social assistance jobs had the biggest decrease in both real percentage change (-3.1%) as well as the real dollar value decrease (-$0.88).
Median wages and real gain over the past year can also be analyzed by firm class size. As has been the case historically, median wage tends to be the highest in firms with at least 500 employees. Median wage is usually lower in smaller firms. That is still the case in third quarter 2024. Further, if we look at how the median wage has fared over the past year when it comes to inflation, we see a pattern. Adjusting median wages for inflation according to CPI-U, we can determine if a wage is worth as much now as it was last year. As it turns out, workers at most sizes of firms had positive wage growth from third quarter 2023 to third quarter 2024. The exception is workers at firms with 500 or more employees, whose median wage decreased by 2.8%, adjusted for inflation.
Health Care and Social Assistance Dominated Job Growth
Of the 10,600 jobs gained between third quarter 2023 and third quarter 2024, health care and social assistance experienced the largest growth (+28,400 jobs; +9.2%). The largest percentage decrease occurred in private educational services (-5.3%), while the largest decrease in jobs occurred in leisure and hospitality (-6,800).
Instead of looking at the raw numerical change, it can sometimes be more helpful to look at the percentage change in jobs. Some industries are larger than others by nature, and large increases or decreases, though they account for many jobs, are a small percentage when compared with the size of the industry. For example, information lost about 1,000 jobs between third quarter 2023 and third quarter 2024. This constituted a 2.7% decrease. For comparison’s sake, leisure and hospitality decreased by about 2.6%, which was a loss of over 6,800 jobs.
It is also interesting to look at the composition of industries in the economy. As different industries experience fluctuations, the number of jobs can increase or decrease enough that the share of jobs for a particular industry increases or decreases within the economy. Generally speaking, adding jobs can lead to a larger share in the economy, while losing jobs can decrease an industry’s share of jobs – though there are exceptions. From the third quarter of 2023 to the third quarter of 2024, the share of jobs in health care and social assistance increased from making up 13.9% of all jobs to 15.1%. Retail trade also increased in its share of all jobs (10.4% to 10.7%).
Looking at the industries that gained jobs between third quarter 2023 and third quarter 2024, health care and social assistance made up the majority of those gains, accounting for 70% of job growth. Losses were spread over a number of industries over the past year.
Note that non-classifiable jobs were excluded from much of this analysis. The individuals under non-classifiable work for employers who have not yet been assigned an industry code, so it really isn’t a “sector.” Those employees will start to show up under other industries in future quarters as we are able to determine the correct code. The wage change over time for this group is meaningless, because the employers – and their employees – included here change each quarter.
To provide better data, this analysis also filters out job records that probably contain errors. Jobs that report zero hours or more than 999 hours (about 77 hours per week) worked in a quarter and jobs that paid less than the federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) are excluded. Jobs that paid more than $500 per hour and reported less than 10 hours work during the quarter are also excluded.