Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2008-04-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 106.5 million full-time wage and salary workers were $719 in the first quarter of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.8 per- cent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 4.1 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. Data on usual weekly earnings are collected as part of the Current Popula- tion 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 $637 per week, or 80.6 percent of the $790 median for men.