The Most Popular Job In Every State

Some jobs are disproportionately concentrated in certain states. Fashion designers flock to New York, Texas has an outsized share of petroleum engineers, and Floridians are much more likely to be motorboat operators than are other Americans.

We made a map that shows the most over-represented job in each state, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' recently released May 2013 Occupational Employment Statistics. Each state has far more of these jobs per capita than the nation as a whole. We'll discuss the methodology later. But first, check out the map.

These are not the most common jobs in these states - that map would be very boring, since the most common job in 42 states is retail salesperson, the most common job in the country.

Instead, this map shows jobs that are disproportionately concentrated in each state. For example, in New York, there are about 7,180 fashion designers, out of a total of 8,635,400 employed people. So, fashion designers account for about 8.3 out of every 10,000 jobs in New York.

In the U.S. as a whole, there are about 17,370 fashion designers, out of a total of 132,588,810 employed people. So, about 1.3 out of every 10,000 jobs in America are in fashion design.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the ratio of these two rates the "location quotient" for a job in a particular area. So, the location quotient of fashion designers in New York is 8.3 ÷ 1.3, which equals about 6.4. That is, there are about 6.4 times as many fashion designers per 10,000 total employed people in New York as in the U.S. as a whole.

The map shows the job in each state with the highest location quotient, among jobs with at least 1000 people employed. These jobs exist in each state at much higher rates than in the country as a whole.