The Dallas employment map

What the county actually counts

Every quarter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics runs a full census of covered employment in Dallas County: every establishment that pays into unemployment insurance, sorted by industry, with a total headcount and an average weekly wage attached. The most recent count, for the first quarter of 2025, put 82,807 establishments in the county on the books, employing 1,817,248 people at an average weekly wage of $1,938^[1]. That county average already runs ahead of the wider Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area's own average of $1,721 a week for the same quarter, across a metro that employed 4,010,696 people at 210,200 establishments^[2]. Dallas County holds just under half the metro's jobs and a noticeably fatter paycheck, which is the first sign that whatever the county's economy is doing, it is not simply retail and warehouses at metro-average wages.

The more interesting story is not in that county-wide average, though. It is in what happens when the same count is broken out by industry, because the sector list contradicts the reputation almost immediately.

The biggest employer doesn't have its name on the skyline

Ask a stranger what Dallas does for a living and the answer usually starts with banking, or insurance, or some version of "finance." The skyline earned that reputation honestly: downtown Dallas is a run of bank towers, and decades of insurance and financial back-office concentration gave the city its reputation as a finance town. The county's own employment count does not agree with that reputation, at least not by headcount. In the first quarter of 2025, finance and insurance employed 110,999 people across the county's private establishments, at an average weekly wage of $3,937, comfortably the best pay of any large sector^[1]. That is a real industry with a real number behind it. It is also smaller, by headcount, than six other private sectors in the same county the same quarter.

The largest private employer in Dallas County by headcount is professional, scientific and technical services, a category that covers law firms, accounting practices, engineering, architecture and computer systems design. It employed 190,905 people across 14,161 establishments in the first quarter of 2025, at an average weekly wage of $2,704^[1]. Second is health care and social assistance, at 188,440 people across 9,574 establishments, paying an average of $1,481 a week^[1]. Neither sector carries anything like finance's civic branding. Neither has a tower downtown with its name on the top floor the way the banks do. Both employ more people than finance and insurance does.

The list keeps going past finance before it runs out of bigger sectors. Administrative and support and waste services, the category that covers staffing agencies, call centers and building services, employed 157,985 people at an average of $1,408 a week^[1]. Accommodation and food services, restaurants and hotels, employed 145,013 people at the lowest average wage of any major sector, $642 a week^[1]. Retail trade employed 144,158 people at $1,036 a week^[1]. Each of those three sectors, on its own, out-employs finance and insurance in the same county the same quarter. So does manufacturing, at 125,284 people and a $2,169 average weekly wage, a sector most people would not expect to find in a city that markets itself as a service economy^[1].

What finance keeps, if not headcount

Laid out by headcount rather than by reputation, the gap is easy to see at a glance.

The wage claim finance still wins

What finance keeps, and keeps decisively, is pay. Its $3,937 average weekly wage is more than double the next sizable sector's rate, and among sectors with any real headcount, only information and management of companies come close, at $4,082 and $3,805 a week, and both of those sectors are far smaller by headcount, at 41,035 and 41,432 people^[1]. Utilities and mining pay even more, $6,532 and $6,034 a week, but between them the two sectors employ barely 11,000 people in the whole county, not enough to move a citywide story either way^[1]. Finance's real claim on Dallas is a wage claim, not a headcount claim: it is the sector best positioned to explain why the county's average paycheck runs ahead of the wider metro's, even though it does not explain who most of the county's paychecks actually go to.

A sector closer to the runway than the reputation suggests

One more sector earns its own mention because of where it sits. Transportation and warehousing employed 111,806 people at a $1,350 average weekly wage, narrowly ahead of finance's 110,999 for headcount even though almost nobody would list it among Dallas's defining industries^[1]. Dallas County captures only part of the freight and logistics activity clustered around Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and the rail and highway corridors around it; the fuller picture of what that airport is worth to the region, including the on-airport jobs the county count does not reach, is the subject of the next piece in this section.

What the city-level numbers add

The count above is a county figure, not a city figure, because that is the geography the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes at. A separate Census Bureau survey gives a city-level read specifically for Dallas: in the American Community Survey's 2019-2023 five-year estimate, 701,693 Dallas residents 16 and older were in the labor force, 666,361 of them employed, for a civilian unemployment rate of 4.9 percent^[3]. Median household income over that same five-year window was $67,760, well below the $106,979 mean, a gap that points to income concentrated at the top of the distribution rather than spread evenly across households, and 13.7 percent of families were living below the poverty line^[3]. None of that contradicts the sector count above. It describes a different population, drawn from where people live rather than where the region's employers happen to sit, and Dallas city's roughly 1,326,087 residents in the Census Bureau's 2024 population estimate are themselves a minority of the county's payroll^[4].

None of this is an argument that Dallas isn't a finance town. It is one, by wage if not by headcount, and that distinction is the more useful fact than either claim on its own. The Dallas Compass reads the city through what its own institutions measure about it rather than through what its skyline implies, and payroll data, read sector by sector instead of tower by tower, is where that habit starts.