Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: Third Quarter 2003 — 2003-10-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 101.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $618 in the third quarter of 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.5 per- cent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.2 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 $550 per week, or 79.8 percent of the $689 median for men.