Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2009-07-16

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.1 million full-time wage and salary workers were $734 in the second quarter of 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.1 percent higher than a year earlier. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) fell by 1.2 percent 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 second-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $652 per week, or 80.0 percent of the $815 median for men. The fe- male-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (91.5 per- cent) and Hispanics (88.9 percent) than among whites (79.1 per- cent) or Asians (80.6 percent).