Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2006-10-19

Median weekly earnings of the nation�s 108.2 million full-time wage and salary workers were $675 in the third quarter of 2006, 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 3.3 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 third-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $599 per week, or 80.0 percent of the $749 median for men. The female-to- male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics or Latinos (87.3 percent), Asians (84.9 percent), and blacks (83.8 percent) than among whites (79.6 percent).