Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: First Quarter 2004 — 2004-04-16

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 99.7 million full-time wage and salary workers were $634 in the first 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 1.8 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 $567 per week, or 79.7 percent of the $711 median for men.