Third Quarter — 1998-10-21

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 97.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $520 in the third quarter of 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 4.2 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.6 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. For further information, see the explanatory note. ---Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $455 a week, or 76.7 percent of the $593 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (88.1 percent) and Hispanics (87.4 percent) than among whites (76.1 percent).