Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage An Salary Workers: Third Quarter 2005

Median weekly earnings of the nation’s 105.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $649 in the third quarter of 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reports. The figure is 2.7 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.8 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. Highlights from the third-quarter data are:

–Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $585 per week, or 81.7 percent of the $716 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (95.5 percent) and Hispanics or Latinos (86.5 percent) than among whites (80.6 percent) or Asians (79.0 percent). (See table 1.)

–Median earnings for black men working at full-time jobs were $533 per week, 72.3 percent of the median for white men ($737). The difference was less among women, as black women’s median earnings ($509) were 85.7 percent of those for their white counterparts ($594). Overall, median earnings of Hispanics or Latinos who worked full time ($462) were lower than those of blacks ($520), whites ($667), and Asians ($761).

–Among men, those age 55 to 64 and age 45 to 54 had the highest median weekly earnings, $858 and $848, respectively. Among women, earnings were highest for 45- to 54-year-olds and 55- to 64-year-olds, $640 and $639, respectively.

–Among the major occupational groups, persons employed full time in management, professional, and related occupations had the highest median weekly earnings–$1,103 for men and $812 for women. Men and women in service jobs earned the least.

–Full-time workers age 25 and over without a high school diploma had median weekly earnings of $413, compared with $583 for high school graduates (no college) and $1,014 for college graduates holding at least a bachelor’s degree. Among college graduates with advanced degrees (professional or master’s degree and above), the highest-earning 10 percent of male workers made $2,729 or more per week, compared with $1,858 or more for their female counterparts.