Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: First Quarter 2005 — 2005-04-21

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $653 in the first quarter of 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.0 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. Data on usual 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 Explanatory Note.) Highlights from the first-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $586 per week, or 80.4 percent of the $729 median for men.