Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2006-07-20

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $659 in the second quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 4.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same pe- riod. 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 second-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $593 per week, or 81.1 percent of the $731 median for men.