Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2009-10-16

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.1 million full-time wage and salary workers were $738 in the third quarter of 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Sta- tistics reported today. This was 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) fell by 1.6 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 third-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $657 per week, or 80.9 percent of the $812 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (95.3 percent) and Hispanics (95.2 per- cent) than among whites (80.0 percent) or Asians (82.6 percent).