Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: Third Quarter 2002 — 2002-10-21

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 99.8 million full-time wage and salary workers were $605 in the third quarter of 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 1.7 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.6 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 third-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $528 per week, or 78.1 percent of the $676 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (89.3 percent) and Hispanics (90.5 percent) than among whites (78.5 percent).