Tampa ranks among least expensive metros for corporate staffing

A company staffing a 100-person corporate office could save millions of dollars a year by choosing Tampa Bay over some of the nation’s largest business hubs, according to a new study.

The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro ranks third least expensive among 50 U.S. metro areas analyzed by the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia. Estimated annual wages and employer-funded benefits for the modeled team total $13.3 million locally, or $133,004 per employee, according to the study provided by Press Data.

That’s 9.94% below the study’s 50-metro average of $14.77 million and about $6.73 million less annually than in San Francisco, the most expensive market in the study. Tampa Bay’s estimated staffing bill is roughly one-third lower than San Francisco’s.

Only Nashville and Jacksonville were less expensive. Nashville’s estimated annual cost was $13.05 million, followed by Jacksonville at $13.25 million. Charleston, South Carolina, and Phoenix rounded out the five least expensive markets, at $13.35 million and $13.36 million, respectively.

The findings offer a measure of Tampa Bay’s labor-cost advantage for companies weighing where to establish or expand a corporate office. However, the study also cautions that lower compensation costs for employers can mean lower pay for workers.

Across all occupations, Tampa Bay workers earned an average of $31.96 an hour in May 2025, compared with $33.54 nationally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Local average wages also trailed national averages in management, business and financial operations, as well as in computer and mathematical occupations.

The chamber of commerce study assigns the same workforce to each metro area.

Its hypothetical regional headquarters includes 27 management employees, 28 business and financial operations employees, 16 computer and mathematical employees, 21 office and administrative support employees, five sales employees, two media and communications employees and one legal employee, the study says.

Researchers calculated payroll using metropolitan-area mean wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data. They then estimated benefits using the ratio of total compensation to wages for each metro’s Census division.

For Tampa Bay, the model puts annual payroll at approximately $9.5 million, with estimated benefits adding another $3.8 million. The $133,004 per-employee figure represents the employer’s combined wage-and-benefit expense across the modeled team, rather than an average salary for Tampa Bay workers.

At the expensive end, San Francisco’s annual total reached $20.03 million, or $200,338 per employee, making it the only metro studied to exceed $200,000 per worker. New York followed at $18.92 million, Seattle at $18.31 million, Boston at $17.71 million and Bridgeport, Connecticut, at $17.46 million.

The gap between the most and least expensive metros was nearly $7 million annually for the same 100 positions, the study shows.

The ranking measures staffing costs, rather than the full expense of running a company. Office space, utilities and other operating expenses are excluded. Benefits are regional estimates, rather than measurements of individual employers’ plans, and actual costs would depend on a company’s positions, experience requirements and compensation packages.