Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: First Quarter 2003 — 2003-04-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 99.0 million full-time wage and salary workers were $620 in the first quarter of 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 1.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.8 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 $551 per week, or 79.3 percent of the $695 median for men.