Dakotas Rank High in Payroll to Population Rankings. Who’s Getting Paid?

(NPN) -- While Washington, D.C. had the highest Payroll to Population rate in the country in 2013, at 55.7 percent, a cluster of states in the Northern Plains -- North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wyoming, Iowa and South Dakota -- all made the top 10.

West Virginia, 51st at 36.1 percent, had the lowest P2P rate of all the states. Montana was the only Northern Plains outlier, landing in the lowest 10 rankings.

P2P is a measurement developed by the Gallup Organization that measures the total number of people who actually hold a full-time job and report it as a percentage of the total population of adults aged 15 years and older.

“What makes this new standard a superior metric to classic, outdated unemployment figures is that the percentage of good jobs is a stronger indicator of real economic energy because it doesn’t get influenced by the ever-fluctuating “size of workforce” variable,” according to a September 2012 blog post by Gallup when they introduced the metric.

Northern Plains states’ results per Gallup: North Dakota, 2nd, 52.2 percent; Nebraska, 3rd, 51.4 percent; Minnesota, 4th, 50.7 percent; Wyoming, 6th, 48.9 percent; Iowa, 7th, 48.5 percent; South Dakota, 10th, 47.3 percent; and Montana, 45th, 39.2 percent.

The national average was 43.8 percent.