Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2007-10-18

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 108.3 million full-time wage and salary workers were $695 in the third quarter of 2007, 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 2.4 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 Technical Note.) Highlights from the third-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $616 per week, or 80.3 percent of the $767 median for men. The female-to- male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics (90.5 percent) and blacks (86.4 percent) than among whites (80.4 percent) or Asians (77.9 percent).