Fourth Quarter — 2002-01-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 98.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $605 in the fourth quarter of 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.9 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 fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $517 a week, or 75.7 percent of the $683 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics (91.1 percent) and blacks (85.7 percent) than among whites (75.8 percent).