Sources & References
Metro Job Market Pulse · Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC MSA · October 2026
Every advertised-pay, job-posting and industry figure in this briefing comes from WageScape's own database of active job postings. The sources below back the external facts cited in the written analysis.
Sources cited in this report
This Month's Takeaways
Georgia lost 9,400 federal government jobs and 11,600 professional/technical jobs YoY
Georgia Department of Labor — Sector-level year-over-year employment change
Georgia health care/social assistance added 19,100 jobs over the year
Georgia Department of Labor — Sector-level annual job gains
Local Economic Conditions
Augusta MSA preliminary unemployment rate 4.0% in July 2026
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Preliminary MSA-level unemployment and labor force data
Richmond County average weekly wages rose 4.7% to $1,226 in Q1 2026
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — County-level wage growth data
Open Threads in the Data
Georgia labor force participation rate at 61.1% as of June 2026
Georgia Department of Labor — Statewide labor force participation figure
Looking Ahead
National wage growth slipped to 3.0%, lowest since May 2021, against 3.4% inflation
Bureau of Labor Statistics — National average hourly earnings and CPI comparison
How the numbers are calculated
- Advertised pay is the median of the pay ranges employers publish in active job postings in this metro. It is not survey or payroll data.
- Percent changes compare the latest six full months with the six months before that, for the same metro and sector.
- Sectors group postings by the employer's industry (NAICS) classification into ten sectors. Where a metro has too few postings in a sector, the state figure is used instead.
- Role pay trends use the same comparison windows. "Stable" means a change of less than 3%; "moderate" 3–10%; "significant" more than 10%.
Official data for comparison