Annual Earnings and Compensation for Workers: Wage Trends over Time

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The concept of “labor market hardship” is a traditional perspective to investigate how employment problems lead to temporary or more persistent deprivation. Unemployment is the most well-known indicator of labor market hardship, but other examples include inadequate real earnings and inadequate work hours (e.g., involuntary part-time work).

Earnings and Compensation Trends over More than a Half Century

An accurate understanding of how much individuals earn, and how earnings change over time, is essential to judgments about basic living standards, the role of earnings in relation to overall income, equity and inequality concerns, economic progress, and to decisions about government policy regarding the foregoing.

Many surveys report earnings, with frequently diverse results that are often attributable to varying earnings definitions and which workers are included. This analysis examines several governmental sources from the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which provide broad coverage, cover lengthy periods, and are all of very high quality.

All compensation and earnings amounts analyzed are adjusted for inflation, using the BLS Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all urban consumers for 2024 dollars. The conventional correction for inflation is the BLS CPI, although the Census Bureau uses a somewhat different CPI scale, for which the necessary data are not available to apply it to some older earnings data.

Additional data sources from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) are included, though they are neither a survey nor based on original data, but rather classifying data collected by other agencies (in this case, primarily BLS and the Census Bureau). However, the BEA data perspective adds value in making an adjustment for full-time-equivalent employees.

Annual Earnings for Full-Time, Year-Round Workers: Wage Trends over Time from 1960-2011

This resource page includes a report with three tables (two from the U.S. Census Bureau, and one calculated from Census Bureau data) and two charts showing trends since the 1960s in annual earnings for full-time, year-round workers (to ensure comparability), for men and women.

The tables show both the actual earnings and the Census Bureau’s adjustment of them for inflation (sometimes referred to as “constant dollars”). One of the charts shows inflation-adjusted earnings trends, and the other shows women’s earnings as a proportion of men’s.

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Content Details

Topics:

Earnings and Benefits Data Employment/Unemployment/Labor Force Data Industry/Occupation Data

Target Populations:

General Audience

Programs:

Non-Program Specific

Geographic Locations:

National Scope

Industry Sectors:

Cross-Industry

Last Updated:
Created:
Resource Publication Date: 2011, 2024
Organizational Author(s): DOL, ETA, OWI Unit
Posted by: Damon Jones
Posted in: LMI Central