<p>The economic returns to human capital are conventionally explained by individual attributes, yet the role of the regional context in which workers are embedded remains underexplored. This study investigates how the returns to human capital vary across structurally distinct types of local labor markets, with particular emphasis on the task-based nature of occupational skills. Departing from approaches that proxy human capital by educational attainment alone, this study integrates task-based measures of occupational skill with a structural classification of local labor markets, thereby linking the spatial division of labor to the structure of wage compensation. Local labor markets are classified into three types—low-tech manufacturing based, mid-/high-tech manufacturing based, and knowledge-intensive service based—using multivariate functional principal component analysis and k-means clustering. Four occupational skill factors (cognitive, technical, interpersonal, and physical) are derived from 44 task dimensions across 537 occupations through exploratory factor analysis, linked to individual-level panel data, and analyzed using fixed-effects models. The results show that returns to cognitive and interpersonal skills are highest in knowledge-intensive service-based regions, whereas returns to physical skills are relatively higher in low-tech manufacturing-based regions. Returns to cognitive skills tend to rise with career experience, while returns to interpersonal and physical skills tend to decline. These findings indicate that the value of human capital is jointly shaped by individual skill profiles and the structural characteristics of local labor markets and underscore the importance of incorporating spatial context into the analysis of human capital returns.</p>