What Jobs Near Boulder Creek Actually Pay, According to 327 Listings

On the morning of August 5, 2026, our jobs board carried 327 openings within reach of Boulder Creek. Not one of them was in Boulder Creek. The closest were nine listings at San Lorenzo Valley Unified, a nine-minute drive down to Ben Lomond.

That's the first thing the data says about working up here, and it sets up the second. Of those 327 listings, 199 post a pay figure, 61 percent. That sounds like a healthy disclosure rate until you see who is doing the disclosing. Almost every employer posting a number is a public agency.

Here is the whole board, counted.

Who posts pay, and who does not

Split the 327 listings by where the work happens and the pattern is stark.

224 of the 327 listings are on-site, and 188 of those post pay, 84 percent. Every single one of those 188 comes from a public employer: 182 from the county schools feed, 4 from the City of Scotts Valley, 1 from the County of Santa Cruz, and 1 from Second Harvest.

The 36 on-site listings that post no pay come from six employers, and five of the six are private. Safeway has 10 openings and no rate on any of them. Community Bridges has 10, Seascape Beach Resort has 8, and there's one each from Central Fire District and Dream Inn. The exception is Cabrillo College, which leaves the pay off 6 of its 19 postings.

The remote side is worse. 103 of the 327 listings are remote, 31 percent, and only 11 of them post pay. In the Technology category, 6 of 57 listings post a figure, 11 percent. In Education, 160 of 166 do, 96 percent.

So this isn't a picture of what work pays around Boulder Creek. It's a sharp picture of what public-sector work pays, and a near-total blank everywhere else.

What hourly work pays

80 listings post an hourly rate. 76 of them are on-site, and all 76 are school district positions. The other four are remote contract rates, which run from $14 to $170 an hour and belong to a different world.

Across those 76 local hourly listings, the median posted rate is $22.66 an hour, using the midpoint where a range is given. Half the postings fall between $19.75 and $26.64. The lowest posted rate is $16.84 and the highest is $50.61, for an adult-education Spanish GED instructor.

58 of the 76 are classroom roles, and 24 of the 76 are instructional assistants, paraeducators or paraprofessionals. The other 18 are the jobs that keep a school running: bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria staff, office and payroll technicians, a health care assistant. Those pay $17.06 to $30.49.

The nine listings at San Lorenzo Valley Unified, the closest employer on the board, follow the same shape. Six post an hourly rate, from $19.94 for an instructional assistant to $29.47 for a bus operator. One posts $160 a day for math intervention support, and two are flat coaching stipends of $1,176 for a season.

What salaried work pays, and why there are fewer figures than listings

70 listings post an annual figure, and 63 of those are on-site. Before quoting a median, one thing has to be said out loud: those 63 figures aren't 63 independent data points. There are only 29 distinct salary ranges among them, because a district publishes one salary schedule and then attaches it to every opening. 27 of the 63 carry the exact same range, $58,520 to $97,574, the Pajaro Valley Unified teacher schedule.

So the median annual figure on this board is that schedule, more or less by definition. The useful version is the list of the actual schedules.

The top of the on-site range is a Chief Business Officer at Pajaro Valley Unified, $211,100 to $248,418. The bottom is a 0.20 FTE elementary music position at $10,897 to $19,728, which is a real annual figure for a one-day-a-week job and a good reminder that an annual number without an FTE next to it means very little.

A note on the ranges themselves. 62 of the 63 on-site annual listings post a band rather than a single number, and the median band is $39,054 wide. That's a salary schedule, not a negotiation: the bottom is what a new hire gets, the top is what someone gets after twenty years and a master's degree. Read the bottom number as the offer.

The pay figure is not always a wage

Of the 199 listings that post a figure, the figure means six different things.

The stipends are worth pulling out. 38 listings pay a flat stipend, and 29 of those are coaching or athletics roles. They run from $1,176 to $5,641 for an entire season. A high school head coach isn't being paid a wage in any normal sense, and anyone reading a job board that averages everything together would never know these rows were in there.

How far you would be driving

Nobody on this board is hiring in Boulder Creek. The 224 on-site listings sit in eight cities.

The median on-site listing is a 40-minute drive. 203 of the 224, 91 percent, are 30 minutes or more. Only 19 are within 20 minutes. Put the $22.66 median hourly rate next to a daily round trip over Highway 9 and the arithmetic of working down the hill gets real fast.

What this count cannot tell you

This is a board, not a labor market. It carries what 11 sources publish in a structured feed, and 188 of the 327 listings come from one of them, the county schools feed on EDJOIN. Schools dominate this board partly because schools are big employers and partly because schools publish complete, structured, pay-included feeds while a hardware store tapes a card to the window.

So: 166 of 327 listings are in Education, 51 percent. That's a fact about the board. It's not a claim that half the jobs near Boulder Creek are in schools.

Two more limits. The feed's own pay parser disagrees with a careful reading of the posted text on 36 rows, usually where a signing bonus or a master's stipend sits at the end of the line, so every figure here was re-derived from the posted text rather than taken from the parsed field. And two posted figures were set aside as unusable: a $200 monthly reserve officer position and a "$3k to $10k" sales listing.

None of this is an average salary for Boulder Creek, and we're not going to compute one. It's 327 specific openings on one specific morning.

Frequently asked questions

Are there any jobs in Boulder Creek itself?

Not on this board, as of August 5, 2026. The closest listings were nine at San Lorenzo Valley Unified in Ben Lomond, about a nine-minute drive. An opening in town that never reaches a published feed won't appear here, and plenty of them never do.

What is the typical hourly rate?

Among the 76 local listings that post an hourly rate, all of them school district jobs, the median is $22.66 an hour and half fall between $19.75 and $26.64. That's the median of what is posted, not of what's paid.

Why do so few remote jobs post pay?

We don't know why, only that they do not: 11 of 103 remote listings post a figure, 11 percent, against 188 of 224 on-site listings. The on-site employers posting rates are almost entirely public agencies whose salary schedules are published documents.

How often does this change?

The board refreshes automatically and the counts move daily. Everything here describes the August 5, 2026 snapshot. For live openings, use the jobs board.

Counted from the Boulder Creek Local jobs board, snapshot dated August 5, 2026. Every figure and chart value in this article comes from that count. The board aggregates 11 published sources and isn't a census of local employment. Pay figures were re-derived from each listing's posted salary text. Openings change daily; see /jobs for what's live now.