Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2010-04-15

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 96.8 million full-time wage and salary workers were $754 in the first quarter of 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Sta- tistics reported today. This was 2.2 percent higher than a year earlier, com- pared with a gain of 2.4 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Con- sumers (CPI-U) over the same period. Data on usual weekly earnings are collected as part of the Current Population Survey, a nationwide sample survey of households in which respondents are asked, among other things, how much each wage and salary worker usually earns. (See the Technical Note.) Highlights from the first-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $665 per week, or 78.8 percent of the $844 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (92.0 percent) and Hispanics (85.6 per- cent) than among whites (78.0 percent) or Asians (81.6 percent).