What Jobs Actually Pay in Provo: A Sector-by-Sector Wage Guide

JoAnn Giordano Editor-in-Chief, Provo.com How we make Provo.com

There is a version of this question that has a clean answer and a version that does not, and almost everyone asks the second one.

The clean version is: what does the state say the average wage is here? That has a number, it is published annually, and it is in the next section. The version people mean is: if I take a job in Provo, what will land in my account? That one does not have a single answer, and the published figures will mislead you about it in a specific, predictable way that this guide is mostly about.

So here is both. The data first, then the correction that makes the data usable.

The county number, and what it is counting

The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the Utah Department of Workforce Services, is not a survey — it is a count, assembled from what employers report for unemployment insurance purposes. It covers essentially every job with a paycheck attached.

For Utah County in 2023, that census reported an average of roughly 290,800 jobs across about 21,800 establishments, paying out $17.5 billion in total wages, for an average monthly wage of about $5,022.

Read that last number carefully, because it is total payroll divided by total jobs. It is not a median, it is not full-time equivalent, and it is not what a typical person earns. A county where a third of the jobs are ten-hour-a-week student positions will produce a lower average than a county where they are not, even if every full-time salary in both places is identical.

Utah County is very much the first kind of county. That single fact explains most of what looks strange in the sector table below.

The sector table

Here is the same census broken out by industry for 2023, in average monthly wage, highest to lowest. Industry rows are private employers; the government row covers all public employers:

Two things in that table are worth stopping on.

Information is not slightly ahead. It is in a different weight class. At roughly $10,595 a month it pays about half again what the next sector does, and six times what leisure and hospitality does. This is the software, telecom and data corner of the economy, and it is concentrated in the north of the county rather than in Provo proper. If you have read that Utah Valley is a tech economy, this row is the reason that story gets told — and the employment column is the reason it is only partly true. Information accounts for a small share of total county jobs. It pays extraordinarily well and it employs comparatively few people.

Leisure and hospitality at $1,754 a month is not a wage. It is an artifact. No restaurant in Provo is paying its full-time staff that. What the number describes is a sector where a very large number of people work a very small number of hours. The same effect, in a milder form, holds education and health services at $4,395, below the county average. That category contains BYU and the hospitals, and therefore contains several thousand students working part-time alongside the nurses and the faculty.

The ordering in that table is reliable and useful. The absolute figures are reliable for what they measure and misleading for what people want them to measure.

The student-labor effect, stated plainly

More than 80,000 students attend BYU and UVU. Most of them want to work, most want fewer than twenty hours a week, and most will accept a rate that a career-stage adult supporting a household cannot.

That has three consequences for anyone reading a Provo pay figure:

1. Published averages in student-heavy sectors run low. Not because pay is bad, but because the denominator is enormous.
2. Entry-level wages are compressed. When an employer can fill a shift from a pool that large, it has no pressure to bid the rate up. This is the honest answer to why service pay here often lags comparable metros.
3. Wages for roles students cannot fill hold up much better. Anything requiring a license, full daytime availability, several years of experience, or a commitment past April sits outside the student pool and prices accordingly.

That third point is the most actionable sentence in this guide. If you are trying to earn well in Utah Valley, the lever is not negotiating harder inside the student-competitive market. It is stepping outside it.

The floor, and the other floor

Utah has no state minimum wage of its own. It tracks the federal $7.25 an hour.

There is also a second, lower floor most people do not know about: employers may pay a youth minimum of $4.25 an hour for a worker's first 90 consecutive calendar days. After that window closes the standard minimum applies. It is legal, it is rarely used by the larger local employers, and it is worth knowing exists if you are sixteen and reading an offer. Our guide to teen jobs in Provo covers the rest of the rules that apply to workers under eighteen.

In practice, very few Utah Valley employers pay at either floor. They pay what it takes to fill the shift against every other employer trying to fill one. The statute is a legal backstop, not a description of the market.

How to read a local offer

The single most useful habit when comparing two Utah Valley offers is to stop comparing hourly rates.

Ask instead:

• What are the guaranteed weekly hours? Not the maximum, the guarantee. In a student-labor market, employers hedge by scheduling short and adding hours only when they need them. A strong rate on twelve unpredictable hours loses to a modest rate on thirty reliable ones, every time.
• Is the schedule fixed or does it move? Rotating schedules are common here and they quietly cost you the ability to hold a second job or a class block.
• What is the seasonality? Enormous parts of this economy empty out between late April and August, and a job whose hours depend on students being in town behaves very differently in June.
• What does the commute cost? The county's employment is spread across twenty-plus municipalities. A dollar more an hour in Lehi can be worth less than the job in Provo once you price the drive.
• Are benefits real or nominal? Part-time roles here often carry a benefits label attached to an hours threshold you are not scheduled to hit.

None of those questions are about the number in the job posting, and all of them will change what the job is worth more than the number will.

Where the higher-paying work is

If the sector table is the map, this is the route.

Information and professional services cluster along the I-15 corridor from Orem north through Lindon, Pleasant Grove, American Fork and Lehi. That corridor is where the top two rows of the table live, and it is a genuine commute from Provo rather than a walk. Our guide to tech jobs in Utah Valley covers that market without assuming you want to move to Lehi.

Healthcare is the most reliable high-wage employer inside Provo itself, and it is licensure-gated, which is exactly the quality that keeps a wage out of the student-competition zone.

Construction and the trades sit mid-table on the average and considerably higher for anyone with a license and a few years in. This is also the part of the local economy least visible in job-board searches, because much of it hires through relationships rather than postings.

Government looks unremarkable at $4,225 a month and is more interesting than that number suggests, because the category bundles part-time seasonal parks staff with career civil service. Our guide to government jobs in Utah County explains how those hiring processes run.

For a broader picture of who signs the checks in this valley, the companion piece on the biggest employers in Utah Valley ranks them by headcount rather than by pay — and the answer is not the tech companies.

The seasonal cycle nobody warns you about

Utah Valley's labor market has a shape that repeats every year, and it is sharper here than in most places because two universities dominate the population.

Late April through August is the trough for employers and the peak for job seekers. Students leave. Restaurants, retail and campus operations lose a large fraction of their staff in a matter of weeks. If you are looking for work and you can commit through the summer, this is the easiest hiring window of the year, and it is the one moment when the student-labor advantage flips in your favor.

Late August is the crunch. Tens of thousands of people arrive at once, and everything that depends on them — housing, moving, retail, food service — hires hard and fast. Competition for those shifts is brutal, but the volume of openings is the highest it gets.

September through April is steady and tight. The student pool is fully deployed, and employers are choosier because they can be.

December and the run-up to it is the other genuine surge, concentrated in retail, warehousing and delivery.

Two practical consequences. First, if you are moving here with flexibility about timing, arriving in early summer rather than late August materially changes what you can get. Second, if a job posting looks unusually attractive in July, check whether the role survives September — some of them are shaped around a gap the students left.

What a wage buys here

A pay figure means nothing without the other half of the equation, and Utah County's other half has moved a great deal in the last decade.

Housing is the dominant line item and the reason local wages feel tighter than they read. Utah is a non-disclosure state, so transaction prices are not public record the way they are elsewhere, and any specific figure you see quoted is an estimate from a private data source rather than an official number. Our guide to Provo housing data sources identifies those data sources one by one. What is not in dispute is the direction: housing costs in Utah County have risen faster than local wages over the past decade, which means the ratio of a given salary to a given rent is worse now than the raw wage growth suggests.

The offsets are real but smaller than the housing gap. Utah's state income tax is a flat rate rather than a graduated one, which advantages higher earners relative to states with progressive brackets. Utility costs run moderate. Car dependence is close to universal outside the FrontRunner and UVX corridors, and that is a fixed cost most local wage comparisons quietly omit.

The practical version: when you compare a Utah Valley offer against one from a higher-wage metro, run the comparison on housing-plus-transport as a share of the offer, not on the offer alone. Sometimes Provo wins that comparison and sometimes it loses it badly, and the wage number by itself will not tell you which.

Negotiating in a student-labor market

Two rules, and they are close to opposites depending on which side of the student pool your role sits on.

Inside the student-competitive band, negotiating leverage on rate is limited. The employer has alternatives and both of you know it. Your leverage is not on the number — it is on hours, schedule stability and start date. Ask for a guaranteed minimum, ask for fixed days, ask to start before the August rush. Those are cheap for the employer to grant and worth more to you than fifty cents.

Outside it — licensed, experienced, full-daytime, year-round — the dynamic inverts completely, because the pool that suppresses entry-level wages simply cannot fill your role. Here the ordinary rules apply, and local employers are used to candidates who do not negotiate at all. Ask.

The mistake to avoid in both cases is anchoring on the county average. It is a statistic about a labor market, not a statement about your role, and quoting it in a conversation about a specific job will make you sound like you are reading from a chart rather than from the market.

The rule Utah has that surprises people

If you are moving here for a role with any competitive sensitivity, know this before you sign: Utah caps post-employment non-competes at one year. The Post-Employment Restrictions Act voids any such agreement entered into on or after 10 May 2016 that extends beyond a year from your final day.

A separate change effective 6 May 2026 bars post-employment non-competes for healthcare workers, with limited exceptions.

The Legislature revisits this statute nearly every session. What is written here is the shape of the law, not legal advice, and the current text is worth checking before you sign a specific document.

What the trend line says

The recent direction is worth holding alongside the wage table. Utah's nonfarm payroll employment grew about 1.6% over the twelve months ending June 2026, adding roughly 27,700 jobs statewide (not seasonally adjusted). Utah County's unemployment rate sat at 3.5% in May 2026, against 3.7% statewide.

Those are healthy numbers, and the state's own chief economist has spent the year pointing at softer readings underneath them — fewer openings per unemployed worker, slipping labor force participation, rising underemployment. A low unemployment rate in a slow-hiring market is not a contradiction. It describes exactly this: people are working, and it is taking longer than it used to for the next person to find the next job.

Budget for a longer search than the headline rate implies. Then use the sector table to make sure the search is pointed somewhere the money is.

Start here

• The parent guide: Jobs in Provo and Utah Valley
• If you have no degree yet: jobs in Provo with no degree or experience
• If you want evening or weekend hours: part-time jobs in Provo
• If you need free help: job help in Utah Valley that costs nothing

Wage figures in this guide come from the 2023 Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for Utah County, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the Utah Department of Workforce Services. Sector ordering is stable year to year; absolute figures move, and the current release is the one to check before quoting a number.

Related Guides

• Gig Work in Provo: The Honest Math on Delivery, Rideshare and Side Apps
• Working at Provo Airport: Who Actually Hires There, and What the Expansion Changes
• Getting Your First Provo Job: Applications That Actually Work Here
• Direct Sales in Utah Valley: Why the Industry's Capital Is Here
• Summer Jobs in Utah Valley That Are Not Door-to-Door Sales
• Vivint: Provo's Smart-Home Giant
• The Best Companies to Work For in Utah Valley: How Those Lists Are Made
• The Five-Year Money Map — what to do with the difference
• Grad School or the Job Market? — whether more school pays here

JoAnn Giordano

Editor-in-Chief

JoAnn Giordano is the editor-in-chief of Provo.com. Having lived in and around Utah Valley for years, she leads the site's editorial direction with a focus on the comprehensive, honest local coverage that helps residents, students, and newcomers feel at home. When she's not shaping Provo.com's restaurant and neighborhood coverage, she's exploring the valley's trails and tracking down the best new spots on Center Street.

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