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🇺🇸United States · High income · 2026-Q2

Portland

44composite score · #31 of 46

MEDIUM · sourced, not yet live-verified

MEDIUM 2026-04-29 (Round F) — newly added. Oregon has strong wage protections but no gig-delivery-specific minimum. Earnings figure is a market-median estimate. To promote to HIGH: need an Oregon BOLI publication including gig delivery, or a Fairwork-style independent rating.

Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.

Earnings (USD per hour)

Net, after tax & expenses$11.52/hr
Gross$16.00/hr

Source: BLS OES + market estimate

What would you take home in Portland?

30hrs

Take-home, weekly

$346

Take-home, monthly

$1,498

Gross, weekly

$480

Gross, monthly

$2,080

With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $1638/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (109% of monthly net).

Take-home is gross hourly minus an estimated tax/expense rate per country. See the methodology page for the derivation. This widget assumes you actually work the hours you set. For app-based delivery, a portion of logged-in time is unpaid waiting; the headline rate reflects engaged time only where regulators have defined it.

Cost of living vs. earnings

Hours of work for one month's rent (1BR outside centre)179 hours

That works out to roughly 41 hours per week. Rent at $1,638 per month is 59 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Portland delivery driver in HUD's “severely cost-burdened” band by the federal definition (over 30 percent of gross income on housing). Measured against net take-home pay, which is what a worker actually has available to spend, the same rent is 82 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $830 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Portland ranks 28th for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.

Rent, 1BR outside centre$1638/mo
Restaurant meal (mid-range)$22.00

Pay vs. local labour market

Minimum wage$15.45/hr
Median wage (all occupations)$26.00/hr

Gross hourly is 104% of local minimum wage, 62% of local median.

Notes

Oregon's minimum wage is tiered by region: Portland Metro $15.45, Standard $14.20, Nonurban $13.20.

View Portland on the interactive map

See full source citations for this city on the sources page. Read about how each metric is computed in the methodology.

Primary earnings source: www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_38900.htm · archived