Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2006-01-19

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 104.6 million full-time wage and salary workers were $659 in the fourth quarter of 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 1.9 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.8 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 fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $588 per week, or 80.4 percent of the $731 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (87.4 percent) and Hispanics or Latinos (86.3 percent) than among whites (79.8 percent) or Asians (76.7 percent).