Kansas City construction workers are more likely to be Latinx and less likely to be U.S. citizens: Wages and counts of construction workers by race/ethnicity and citizenship status
| Kansas | Kansas City | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count/shares | Median annual earnings | Median hourly wage | Count/shares | Median annual earnings | Median hourly wage | |
| Overall | 74,029 | $39,171 | $20.77 | 6,209 | $34,088 | $18.07 |
| Race/ethnicity | ||||||
| White | 71.7% | $42,610 | $22.59 | 35.1% | – | – |
| Black | 1.8% | – | – | 2.4% | – | – |
| Latinx | 23.7% | $32,987 | $17.49 | 61.7% | $29,356 | $15.57 |
| Other | 2.8% | – | – | 0.8% | – | – |
| Citizenship Status | ||||||
| U.S.-born | 81.6% | $41,421 | $21.96 | 45.9% | $42,238 | $22.40 |
| Naturalized citizen | 4.3% | – | – | 4.2% | – | – |
| Noncitizen | 14.1% | $31,679 | $16.80 | 49.9% | $28,350 | $15.03 |
Notes: Kansas City refers to the consolidated city-county metro of Kansas City-Wyandotte County. All wages data are in 2020 dollars. Some wage data omitted due to sample size.
Source: Economic Policy Institute analysis of American Community Survey five-year 2019 microdata and May 2020 Occupational Employment Statistics. Median annual wages by race/ethnicity calculated for the Construction Industry from the ACS microdata. Overall median hourly wages are from the published May 2020 OES data and are for Construction and Extraction occupations since geographic data by industry is not available. Median hourly wages by race/ethnicity calculated by applying the ratio of each race/ethnicity’s median annual wages to the overall annual median and applying it to the overall hourly median from the OES.
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