Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers News Release — 2008-10-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 107.2 million full-time wage and salary workers were $720 in the third quarter of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.6 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 5.3 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 Popula- tion Survey, a nationwide sample survey of households in which respon- dents 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 $631 per week, or 79.3 percent of the $796 median for men.