SAN JOSE — Hiring in Silicon Valley has staggered to a halt, yet per-capita income has jumped higher, according to a new report about the region’s economy.
Both bright spots and forbidding challenges dot the region’s economic landscape, the 2025 Silicon Valley Index determined. As of mid-2024, Silicon Valley had 1.717 million jobs, according to the index. That was about 4,000 fewer than the 1.721 million jobs in the region as of mid-2023, or a 0.2% decline.
The annual report, produced by Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s Institute for Regional Studies, defines Silicon Valley as Santa Clara County, San Mateo County and the Fremont area.
The weak job market is largely due to retrenchment by the tech industry, which has unleashed waves of layoffs in recent years, according to the report.
“The tech sector has shifted out of high gear, ending a 12-year run of aggressive expansion and focusing instead on efficiency and profitability,” Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, said in an opening statement for this year’s index.
While Silicon Valley’s push for profitable operations may please Wall Street and investors, the tech industry’s quest can imperil its workers’ jobs and curb hiring, Hancock warned
“That strategy is working and handsomely, but it spells a new period of low or no growth in the valley,” Hancock said.
As the region’s employment picture has darkened, income levels have galloped ahead in recent years, the index report stated.
Per-capita personal income reached an all-time high in Silicon Valley to $157,100 in 2023, the report found. That was up 2.6% from the per-capita income of $153,000 in 2022. The year 2023 was the most recently available year for this economic barometer.
San Francisco’s per-capita income was $164,800 in 2023, up 5.8% from 2022.
In 2023, per-capita incomes were $81,255 in California and $69,810 in the United States.
Despite the rise, the cost of living in the Bay Area countered any benefits from higher income levels, the report warned.
“This top-line figure obscures the reality that inflation has eroded many of those gains. Inflation-adjusted per capita income remained largely stagnant,” the report stated.
Despite robust wages in Silicon Valley, a considerable wage gap remains firmly in place.
“The female-to-male wage ratio for full-time workers has remained fairly consistent in Silicon Valley over the past decade, with an average of $0.77 earned by females for every $1 earned by males,” the report stated.
San Francisco and California weren’t much better, according to statistics, which were calculated in 2023, the most recent year for which the wage-gap information was available.
“In 2023, both San Francisco at $0.78 and California at $0.81 had greater gender parity in average wages compared to Silicon Valley or the nation as a whole,” according to the report.
Despite a jump in average income, not everyone is enjoying wage increases equally.
“The wealth gap is increasing in Silicon Valley. We can say that objectively,” Hancock said in an interview with this news organization. “Fewer and fewer people are holding the higher income brackets of the most wealthy.”
Silicon Valley is home to 56 billionaires and 145,000 millionaire households, the report stated.
“The concentration of wealth in the region is staggering,” the report said. “The top 1% of households now hold an estimated 15% of Silicon Valley’s collective liquid assets, while the bottom 50% struggle to claim even a fraction of that pie.”
According to the report, inflationary and housing-cost pressures have crimped the pocketbooks of the vast majority of residents of Silicon Valley, while the wealthiest have managed to escape the economic squeeze.
“All but the high flyers are slammed by soaring costs and stagnant wages, and there is scant progress on our most pressing issue, housing,” the report stated.
For several years, Silicon Valley has suffered a net exodus of residents from the region to other parts of the Bay Area, California or the United States, the study determined.
In 2024, an estimated 18,840 Silicon Valley residents exited that region for other areas. In 2023, the out-migration totaled 9,200, while in 2022, the outflow was 53,570, according to the report.
Hancock believes the departures of residents and workers have helped undermine the job markets both in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
“This report shows mounting evidence that our housing woes are driving away our labor force,” Hancock stated in the report.
The rise of remote work and virtual meetings has further spurred the viability of departures from the tech job hubs of Silicon Valley, in Hancock’s view. The tech tools that are prevalent in Silicon Valley are making its residents — as well as countless workers worldwide — more productive.
But in Silicon Valley, cutting-edge digital technology has also helped to disperse some of the area’s workforce.
“This new development opens up a strange new world, one that was unimaginable back in the days when location and proximity truly mattered,” Hancock stated in the report.