Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: Third Quarter 2004 — 2004-10-20

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 102.3 million full-time wage and salary workers were $632 in the third quarter of 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.3 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 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 third-quarter data are: Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $571 per week, or 81.1 percent of the $704 median for men.