Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2015-01-21

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 107.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $799 in the fourth quarter of 2014 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 1.7 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.2 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.) Data shown in this news release are not seasonally adjusted unless otherwise specified. Highlights from the fourth-quarter data are: --Median weekly earnings were $799 in the fourth quarter of 2014. Women who usually worked full time had median weekly earnings of $724, or 82.1 percent of the $882 median for men.