Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2006-04-20

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 103.5 million full-time wage and salary workers were $668 in the first quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.3 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.6 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. (See the Explanatory Note.) Highlights from the first-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $600 per week, or 80.6 percent of the $744 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (93.9 percent) and Hispanics or Latinos (86.6 percent) than among whites (79.6 percent) or Asians (71.1 percent).