Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2009-01-22

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 105.8 million full-time wage and salary workers were $728 in the fourth quarter of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 4.0 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.6 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.) Highlights from the fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $650 per week, or 80.5 percent of the $807 median for men.