Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2009-04-16

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $738 in the first quarter of 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.6 percent higher than a year earlier. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) was unchanged 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 first-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $649 per week, or 78.9 percent of the $823 median for men. The fe- male-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (93.9 per- cent) and Hispanics (88.4 percent) than among whites (77.9 per- cent) or Asians (81.3 percent).