Lane County wages lag behind Oregon and national averages

Ernest Lessenger has called Eugene home for eight years. 

He’s a tech worker, part of a recently spotty, but steady, migration of workers who became enamored of Eugene’s quality of life and relative affordability. Since moving from Georgia to continue his work as a remote IT consultant, he’s made a comfortable living in Eugene.

Yet he believes choosing to live in Eugene — where there are few in-person tech jobs and opportunities to negotiate higher pay — is a trade-off between quality of life and salary. 

“I feel that living in Eugene reduces my negotiating power and limits my ability to network and change jobs,” Lessenger said, pointing to the lack of a strong tech scene locally. “That, in turn, makes it harder for me to find a high salary doing the work I want to do.”

The salary situation isn’t limited to tech. Across the board, the average wage for Lane County is lower compared to the average wage in other Oregon counties — even with Portland’s much higher wages removed from the average. And the gap has grown over the past few years.

Once, when Lane County’s timber industry was stronger, its average wages were comparable to the U.S. national average, or even to Portland’s, a city with a much higher cost of living. Since the industry’s decline, however, the gap between larger metro areas and smaller Oregon cities has widened.

During much of the last 40 years, up until the pandemic, Lane County’s wages had largely plateaued, with only a few short-lived upward bumps.

During the late 1990s and 2000s, the county’s average wage inched upward after an influx of jobs in RV manufacturing and computer chip fabrication. After heavy layoffs in both industries, however, those gains didn’t stick for long.

Local tech employment saw some gains in the years after the Great Recession. A handful of small companies and startups popped up around downtown, leading business leaders to dub Eugene the “Silicon Shire.” The momentum helped pull average wages higher — ever so slightly.

While there was another uptick during the pandemic, those gains occurred from businesses cutting low-paying service industry jobs, which allowed the overall wage average to increase.

Currently, Lane County’s average wage is lower than the average wage in comparable areas in Oregon. In 2024, the average annual wage in Lane County was $59,000. The average wage for parts of Oregon not including Lane County and Portland was nearly $62,000.

Wage-gap factors 

Lane County’s wage gap stems from a variety of factors, said Oregon Employment Department economist Henry Fields, who works in Eugene. For one, there’s the large cohort of fresh entry-level students who graduate from the area’s colleges every year.

“People do talk about the fact that the (University of Oregon) provides a steady entry-level graduate class that helps drive down local wages,” Fields said. “For example, let’s say for a business occupation, I can hire a new MBA grad from UO who might be 25 years old, instead of having to pay for a more experienced candidate.”

The lack of high-paying jobs in technology and business is another factor pulling average wages down, Fields said. It’s an issue shared across smaller metro areas in Oregon and across the country.

“There’s the small-city problem. We just don’t have those very high-wage occupations,” Fields said. “We don’t have that concentration of business and legal and math occupations that other places do. That’s not unique to our area, but it is definitely experienced in our area.”

The data backs it up. In Lane County’s computer and mathematical occupations, a worker makes $9 less per hour than the national average. It’s similar to Salem or Corvallis, where workers in those occupations make $8 and $7 less than the national average, respectively.

​In some areas, such as management, Lane County’s occupational wage is even lower. Management workers here make $12 an hour less than the national average, and also less than wages in Salem and Corvallis.

Lessenger has noticed that the lack of high-wage jobs has forced graduates to move out of Eugene in search of work.

He hosts a weekly Tech Tuesday meetup that gathers tech workers at a local bar. Every once in a while, recent graduates come in looking for jobs, yet they never stay for long.

“They come out of Lane Community College. They come out of the University of Oregon, and they’re local,” Lessenger said. “They come to Tech Tuesday for a while, until they get a job, and then they leave Eugene.”

Boosting local wages

Local economic development organizations are working to close Eugene’s wage gap. In November, the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce held an economic summit highlighting the challenges to business growth and retention that Eugene and Oregon face.

Lower wages are a key part of the region’s affordability crisis, said Ashley Espinoza, executive director of the Lane Workforce Partnership, which works with employers and government agencies to strengthen the local workforce.

“What we’re seeing is not a single point in time. It’s a trend. And the trend tells us that, relative to the state and the nation, Lane County per capita is getting poorer,” Espinoza said. “Housing is getting less affordable, education is getting less affordable. It means things are headed in the wrong direction.”

That’s why Lane Workforce Partnership is investing in what it calls its “key sectors.” Those include technology, bioscience, health care and seven other occupational areas. These are sectors the organization believes have higher wage prospects and which could boost the county’s overall wage as well.

“We need to continue to focus on increasing the diversification of our industries locally, focusing on those industries that show high demand and also a higher percentage of occupations that pay above the average,” Espinoza said.