Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2016-04-19

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 109.1 million full-time wage and salary workers were $830 in the first quarter of 2016 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 2.7 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.1 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. Data on usual weekly 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 in this news release.) Data shown in this release are not seasonally adjusted unless otherwise specified. Highlights from the first-quarter data are: --Median weekly earnings of full-time workers were $830 in the first quarter of 2016. Women had median weekly earnings of $750, or 82.2 percent of the $912 median for men.