Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2007-01-19

Median weekly earnings of the nation�s 106.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $682 in the fourth quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.5 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 Technical Note.) Highlights from the fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full-time had median earnings of $609 per week, or 81.3 percent of the $749 median for men. This ratio has trended up gradually since the data were first collected in 1979; at that time, it was 62.5 percent.