Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2010-01-21

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 98.7 million full-time wage and salary workers were $748 in the fourth quarter of 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Sta- tistics reported today. This was 2.7 percent higher than a year earlier, com- pared with a gain of 1.4 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 $670 per week, or 81.2 percent of the $825 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (93.4 percent) and Hispanics (86.6 per- cent) than among whites (79.9 percent) or Asians (83.5 percent).