Rising costs of living, resulting in part from trends in necessities such as housing and child care, have driven up the amount needed to earn a living wage and meet families’ immediate needs. Yet in most US counties, the pay from an average job doesn’t cover basic expenses for a family of one adult and two children, according to the most recent data from the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Data Dashboard. This is true even in many of the highest-earning counties.

People also need access to living wage jobs to be able to reach long-term upward mobility, or a better standard of living than the previous generation experienced. That’s why the Upward Mobility Framework includes rewarding work as one of the essential pillars of support communities must provide for residents to achieve social and economic mobility.

In this short analysis, we measured access to rewarding work for US counties using Mobility Metrics from the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard, including jobs paying living wages, employment opportunities, opportunities for income, and financial security. Based on these metrics, we categorize counties’ access to rewarding work as high, mixed, or low. Examining counties across these categories illustrates that policymakers must consider many factors that affect access to rewarding work in their communities to be able to design policies that advance long-term prosperity for all residents.

What conditions affect opportunities for rewarding work in a community?

Exploring multiple measures of rewarding work at the same time tells a very different story than just looking at household incomes. Strength in one of the metrics for rewarding work does not guarantee an environment of economic opportunity.

To analyze differences in opportunities for rewarding work, we sort these counties into three groups: high, mixed, and low opportunity. We limited our analysis to counties with at least 20,000 residents, which leaves 1,822 counties.

We derived the opportunity categories by averaging the percentile rank each metric represents relative to all other counties. High-opportunity counties are those where the average rank for the our metrics from the rewarding work pillar is above the 80th percentile. For low-opportunity counties, we chose from the 56 counties whose average rank for all of these metrics was below the 20th percentile. For mixed-opportunity counties, we chose from a smaller sample of 19 counties with wide variation between these metrics, meaning they had one or more metrics that ranked very differently from one another (for example, good employment and limited outstanding debt but very low household incomes).

High-Opportunity Communities Have Higher Median Incomes, Higher Employment, More Affordable Costs of Living, and Less Debt

Notes: Categories of opportunity were determined by the average percentile ranking of each metric under the rewarding work pillar. High-opportunity counties are those with an average above the 80th percentile ranking, low-opportunity counties are below the 20th percentile of rankings, and mixed-opportunity counties are those above the 75th percentile of variance between percentile rankings.

For the rest of this post, we take a closer look at a diverse selection of counties from each category to understand the defining characteristics of each location.

• High opportunity: Hennepin County, Minnesota; Arlington County, Virginia; and Broomfield County, Colorado
• Mixed opportunity: Summit County, Colorado; St. Louis County, Missouri; and Washington County, Minnesota
• Low opportunity: Hoke and Robeson Counties in North Carolina.

What characterizes a high-opportunity county?

Hennepin County, Minnesota; Arlington County, Virginia; and Broomfield County, Colorado, boast some of the highest aggregate scores for rewarding work. They consistently provide a high number of well-paying employment opportunities that limit the share of individuals in financial distress, as measured by debt in collections.

Most counties, including high-opportunity communities, struggle with high costs of living. We use a measure of the pay on an average job compared with the cost of living for a family of one adult and two children to evaluate whether residents can cover their basic costs. In 2023, only 28 counties—or fewer than 1 percent of all counties—had average jobs with pay that exceeded the area’s cost of living.

High household incomes aren’t enough to keep up with high costs of living, even in communities with six-figure median incomes. This suggests that although high-opportunity counties like Hennepin, Arlington, and Broomfield have the income to support families’ access to upward mobility, they may still need to focus on supply-side solutions that affect costs of living, such as increasing the housing stock (PDF), to improve conditions for upward mobility.

High Household Incomes Don’t Guarantee Affordable Costs of Living

Source: Author calculations based on 2025 Upward Mobility Data Dashboard, using 2023 data for household income and jobs paying living wages.
Notes: Limited to counties with at least 20,000 residents.

What characterizes a low-opportunity county?

On the other end of the spectrum, Hoke and Robeson Counties in North Carolina consistently experience low opportunities among all four measures of rewarding work. Because they have a limited number of well-paying employment opportunities, many residents cannot cover their costs of living, and a high share experience financial stress.

Hoke and Robeson Counties share a border and were affected by deindustrialization in manufacturing and the consolidation of farm work, which may have reduced the number of high-paying jobs. Many workers earn less than a living wage, indicating the jobs that replaced farm and manufacturing work haven’t kept up with the cost of living. Broad economic revitalization efforts, such as improving access to catalytic capital, would benefit communities like Robeson and Hoke, where all four rewarding work metrics have room for improvement.

What characterizes a mixed-opportunity county?

Summit County, Colorado; St. Louis County, Missouri; and Washington County, Minnesota, provide mixed opportunities for rewarding work, illustrating the complexity of reaching upward mobility in America.

St. Louis has many employment opportunities, but the average household’s take-home income is very low. The figure below shows that St. Louis is relatively affordable despite these lower incomes, but more than a third of adults have debt in collections.

In contrast, Summit County, Colorado, has many moderate- and high-paying employment opportunities, but the cost of living is sky high. The figure below shows that Summit County has one of the lowest income-to-cost-of-living ratios in the US, despite boasting some of the highest employment rates.

High Employment Doesn’t Guarantee Families Can Afford the Cost of Living

Source: 2025 Upward Mobility Initiative Data Dashboard.
Notes: Limited to counties with at least 20,000 residents.

Washington County, Minnesota, similarly has high incomes and broad employment, but the cost of living is extremely high compared with the average wage. This highlights how high costs of living can undermine the advantages of a strong labor market. Washington County borders the high-opportunity community of Hennepin, Minnesota, showing that local conditions can vary widely even within the same region.

How can local policymakers advance opportunities for rewarding work and upward mobility?

Improving opportunities for rewarding work—and upward mobility—in a community requires more than just increasing household incomes. It also requires broad employment opportunities, manageable costs of living, and the ability to pay down debts. We offer three strategies local policymakers can explore to create these conditions, depending on a community’s level of opportunity for rewarding work.

High-opportunity communities that continue to struggle with a low share of households earning a living wage should consider solutions that ease the cost of living, which may prove more effective than marginally increasing household income. Many of these counties could reduce the cost of living by increasing their housing supply. Eliminating overly restrictive land-use regulations and dedicating funding to housing development and rehabilitation are two promising strategies for increasing a community’s housing units.

Low-opportunity communities may require interventions by community development institutions, such as using social-impact venture capital, to help fund projects that promote economic and social benefits. Towns and cities in low-opportunity counties can improve access to social-impact capital by building a capital fund to decrease the costs of community development investment through subsidies, guarantees, and other methods.

Mixed-opportunity communities likely need to draw from the strategies offered for both high- and low-opportunity counties.

The ideal solutions for boosting upward mobility vary from county to county, and progress will require policies tailored to communities’ unique circumstances. Though this analysis focuses on metrics related to rewarding work, communities can use metrics from each pillar of the Upward Mobility Framework to best match policies to their communities. Local leaders interested in making similar changes can access their community’s data through the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard and use the Toolkit for Increasing Upward Mobility to begin developing a strategy.