WASHINGTON — Want to be among the best-paid nurses in the country? Move to San Jose, Calif., and make $87,950 a year.

Prefer to work as a correctional officer? You might try Vineland, N.J.

What if professional dancing is your gig? The top money is in Vegas.

That's where the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports those occupations received the highest average pay last year.

The data, in fact, covers about 800 occupations and more than 400 metropolitan areas. It's available for free on the Internet at the BLS Web site for Occupational Employment Statistics (www.bls.gov/oes).

So if you are a bartender or electrician looking to relocate where the pay is better, is this information useful?

"I think for cities of, let's say, over a couple of hundred thousand, the numbers are likely to be very reliable," said Peter Orazem, an economics professor at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.

However, in Orazem's hometown of Ames — one of the nation's smallest metropolitan statistical areas — the information can be unreliable and needs to be compared with salaries statewide or in larger metro areas within the same state.

In the case of San Jose-area nurses, there's lots of evidence pay levels are either the highest in the nation or close to it. California nurses are higher paid than their counterparts in other states and the California Nurses Association, which represents most nurses in the area, says salaries are higher than in Southern California.

In Honolulu, registered nurses earned an average of $66,230 annually last year, according to the BLS.

Beverly Elemen is a nurse practitioner from San Jose who earns $60 an hour under a contract the union has with Kaiser Permanente.

"I feel like I am well compensated," said Elemen, who chooses to work 32 hours a week — less than full time — and grosses more than $99,000 annually.

As a nurse practitioner, she earns more than a registered nurse. A registered nurse with five years experience earns $96,928 annually for a 40-hour week. Next year that increases to $102,731 under a new contract not yet ratified by the nurses' union.

But Elemen also lives in an area with high housing costs. Homes in her neighborhood sell for $650,000 and none of her three grown children can afford a single-family home in San Jose.

"I feel like there sometimes is a price to pay for where we choose to live," said Elemen, 55. "The price of housing is one of the crosses you have to bear."

The San Jose area also provides the top annual pay for chief executives ($179,720) and stonemasons ($61,520). Pay for comparable positions in Honolulu are $135,130 and $50,370 respectively

Northern California metropolitan areas rank among the highest paying areas for a significant number of occupations.

Want to be a firefighter? The Oakland-Fremont-Hayward, Calif., metro area led the nation at $77,100. Firefighters in Ho-nolulu made an average of $42,690 last year.

Charles Garcia, president of IAFF Local 55 representing firefighters in Oakland and two neighboring cities, said the applicants for the Oakland Fire Department come from as far away as Oklahoma to take the exam.

Housing costs are not as high in southern New Jersey, where the BLS estimates the average correctional officer in the largely rural Vineland-Millville-Bridgeton metropolitan area earned the highest pay in the nation last year — $58,600.

"You are walking in off the street making $50,000 without a college degree if you pass the test and go through the academy," said Joseph Malagrino, president of PBA Local 105 which represents 6,000 New Jersey state correctional officers. "But you are getting paid for the risks."

The last time he checked, Malagrino said the waiting list for job openings had 20,000 applicants.

The Honolulu average pay for a correctional officer last year was $37,420.

The federal government counted 50,410 Americans who were employed on a business's payroll as a musician or singer last year. Almost 30,000 of them worked for performing arts companies at an average wage of $25.89 an hour.

But the 900 musicians and singers who lived in the Seattle metropolitan area made considerably more, an average of $44.78 an hour. In Honolulu the average pay for musicians and singers was $29.73 an hour.

The government database doesn't keep track of earnings among the self-employed.

Even so, it does highlight how workers in many occupations are paid considerably more in some places than in others.

Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining for the 3.2 million-member National Education Association, says that's long been the case for teachers.

For example, the NEA says the starting salary for a teacher in North Dakota averaged $24,035 last year, compared to $40,300 in New Jersey.

Nationwide, teachers of all experience levels are paid an average of $47,000, according to the NEA. The average starting pay for teachers in Hawai'i was $37,615, while teachers of all experience levels were paid an average of $46,149.