But do high housing costs in Colorado negate salary gains?

After five turbulent years that spanned the COVID pandemic and major shifts in U.S. economic policy, are wage earners coming out ahead?

The answer for U.S. workers as a whole is no.

But for those employed here in Denver? Yes, a little, a new study suggested.

The report issued last week by the London-based tech firm Energy Drive said that workers in the metro Denver area averaged a $344 annual increase in real wages over the five-year span, even after factoring out the cost of inflation.

That, according to the study, ranks the Denver area as having the 14th highest real wage increase of all major U.S. metro areas.

The news comes at a moment when Colorado’s economy is on the minds of voters, who will pick a new governor this November.

Two weeks ago, term-limited Gov. Jared Polis had trumpeted another report by a nonpartisan policy group showing Colorado outperforming the national economy. However, details in that report showed Colorado lagging competing states like Arizona, Texas and Utah, and it noted that city and state policy issues could be harming the state’s climate in luring business growth.

That study issued a 40% chance of a recession in Colorado next year.

Earlier, CNBC also dropped Colorado’s ranking in its annual “America’s Top States for Business” from 11th-best in 2025 to 25th-best now, owing in part to a rating of its “business friendliness.” The reports had noted an unusual shift toward population loss, as workers deal with high costs of living and expensive housing in the state.

The new Energy Drive study, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data on inflation and wages for 755 occupations from May 2020 to May 2025, said that Denver’s average salary had risen from $64,880 to $81,690, translating to the $344 annual increase when adjusted for 2025 dollars.

That salary, the study said, was $1,175 better than the average U.S. wage change, which dropped $831 over the five-year term.

However, one of the study’s authors noted that because the inflation rate is based on national consumer price index data, higher localized inflation costs could shade the positive ranking for a single area. Colorado, meanwhile, is registering much higher housing costs that could also alter the marginally positive performance headlined for Denver in the study.

According to the analysis, metro Denver’s wage performance jibed with that of Colorado as a whole, which it placed as the nation’s 13th best statewide ranking, showing an actual earnings increase of $909.

Does cloak major differences in real performance?

The study by the London firm has drawn some criticism.

That includes its selection of 2020 as a base year, when the nation was reeling from the onset of the COVID pandemic and when there may have been significant offsets in wage performance between higher earners, less likely to have been displaced by shutdowns, and lower earners, who were more likely. 

Its breakout among individual occupations in Denver painted a picture of solid wage growth for lower-paid, less professional occupations, but poorer growth for tech-related occupations that had notably driven growth in the past.

According to the study, trades that had shown some of the biggest earnings increases since 2020 included short-order cooks, jumping from an average inflation-adjusted salary of $36,999 in 2020 to $51,530 in 2025, a 39% increase. In contrast, mining engineers and environmental technicians saw real salary drops of around 29%, according to the data.

Denver real estate agents, it noted, lost an average of 41% in annual salary levels from the soaring housing market during the pandemic to the much higher mortgage rate environment last year.

Denver’s 14th-ranked national performance was bested by Jacksonville, with a $3,086 (5%) real average wage increase; Salt Lake City, with a 3% hike; and Austin with 2.9%. Idaho saw the biggest wage increase among the state rankings, up 4.25% after inflation.

In a comment accompanying the study, Jake Maruschok, an engineer at Energy Drive, conceded that the focus on an average salary could cloak major differences in real performance between high earners and lower ones that performed better.

Inflationary cost of housing

“The (Denver) metro area’s lowest earners saw real earnings increase the most, at 14.96%, while all people earning at the median or more saw falls in their real earnings,” Maruschok said in the statement.

He noted that the CPI inflation index is a national average, suggesting that the “real” increase shown in the study may not reflect actual costs for Denver area workers dealing with exceptional housing costs.

The nation’s poorest performing metro areas, according to the study, included Hartford, Conn., Providence, R.I., Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Meanwhile, a separate study by the Romer Institute of Evidence-based Policy had shown Colorado’s gross domestic product trailing five similar states. It noted that wages in Colorado run well ahead of peer states, but that higher living costs reduce the benefits to workers and add employer costs.

Last week also saw a launch of Polis’ new Governor’s Competitiveness Council, which seeks to address a perceived slump in the business climate.

Business leaders have repeatedly expressed worries about what they described as Colorado’s heavy regulatory environment and pointed to Palantir, a major tech company, uprooting its headquarters and moving to Florida as a sign that things are not well in the Centennial State.