Tech workers in San Jose and San Francisco made the highest wages in the nation, while their counterparts in Oakland ranked fourth in pay, according to a survey of 60 metropolitan areas published today by the American Electronics Association.

This is the first time since the dot-com era that the Washington-based trade group has studied tech employment on a city-by-city basis. Though the report is titled Cybercities 2008, it is based on federal data from 2006, the most recent year for which local job details are available.

The association found that 5 out of 6 metropolitan areas added tech jobs between 2005 and 2006, as employment slowly returned from post-crash lows in 2003.

These are the types of jobs every city wants, said association President Christopher Hansen.

Yet so deep were layoffs after the bust that, even now, the nation has fewer jobs in the industry than in 2000, when tech employment peaked.

Locally, the report shows that the Bay Area''''s three metropolitan regions - San Jose-Silicon Valley, San Francisco and vicinity, and the Oakland-East Bay zone - had 511,400 tech jobs before the crash.

After modest gains starting in 2003 and 2004, these three areas had just 386,100 tech workers in 2006 - a drop of 25 percent in the number of high-tech payroll jobs in the Bay Area.

The association lists 49 types of firms under the high-tech label. These range from chip and computer makers to software and service vendors.

The city-by-city snapshot delivers some surprises, starting with the realization that in total tech job count, the New York (316,500) and Washington (295,800) metropolitan areas beat third-place San Jose-Silicon Valley (225,300).

But when the association computed the average annual high-tech wage in each of the 60 cities, the tables turned.

San Jose had far and away the richest annual average wage, at $144,828, followed by San Francisco ($118,518), Austin, Texas ($100,536), and Oakland ($96,930).

By comparison, Washington ranked ninth with an average annual wage of $92,718 and New York 11th at $91,451. Nationwide, the average tech wage was $79,484 in 2006.

High salaries gave Silicon Valley the top tech payroll despite its third place in job count. When the association multiplied the average wage by the total jobs, San Jose/Silicon Valley had a $32.6 billion tech payroll. More jobs but at lower salaries made New York second ($28.9 billion) and Washington ($27.4 billion) third.

The report reveals two facts that underlie Silicon Valley''''s huge payroll - the region remains a manufacturing center, and manufacturing jobs, by and large, pay better than service jobs.

The association divided the tech industry into 16 sectors - nine in manufacturing, and seven in services or software.

Silicon Valley was first or second in jobs in six of the nine manufacturing sectors. The average high-tech manufacturing wage in 2006 was $82,454 nationwide.

By comparison, the average high-tech software and service wage in 2006 was $78,602. The New York metropolitan area ranked first or second in five of the seven software and service sectors. Washington was first or second in jobs in three of the seven areas.

While Northern Californians may think they own the Internet, thanks to widely known locals like Yahoo and Google, Silicon Valley came in fourth in employment with 18,100 Internet jobs behind New York (26,300), Dallas-Fort Worth (20,900) and Washington (20,300).

The report ranked San Francisco a distant second in software publishing employment, with 11,500 jobs, far behind Seattle (43,600), which leads the nation thanks to Microsoft.

Other than having the fourth-highest salaries in the nation, Oakland and the East Bay communities came away relatively undistinguished by the report''''s findings. The Oakland area ranked 17th out of the 60 cities in terms of total tech employment, but it was 37th in terms of percentage growth as tech payrolls grew just 1 percent from 2005 to 2006 versus 1.6 percent for the nation as a whole.

San Francisco saw tech jobs grow 3.4 percent from 76,800 in 2005 to 79,400 in 2006.

Employment grew by a slightly lower percentage rate in San Jose, which added 5,900 jobs in 2006.

The electronics association distributes the Cybercities report to state and local officials and other policymakers nationwide.