In 2023, the usual median hourly rate of a worker's wage in the United States was 19.24 U.S. dollars, a decrease from the previous year. Dollar value is based on 2023 U.S. dollars. In 1979, the median hourly earnings in the U.S. was 17.48 dollars.

We use new establishment-by-occupation microdata to show that the wage stagnation of the 1970s and 80s was linked to a decline in standardized pay. Increasingly, wages for blue-collar workers were not fixed by job title or seniority, but instead subject to managerial discretion. From 1974 to 1991, employers nearly doubled their use of discretionary pay-setting. Panel regressions show that wages fell under the new pay-setting approach, particularly for the lowest-paid workers in a job and for those in establishments that previously paid above market rates. In an era of declining worker bargaining power, increasing employer discretion over pay-setting facilitated wage stagnation.

In March 2025, inflation amounted to 2.4 percent, while wages grew by 4.3 percent. The inflation rate has not exceeded the rate of wage growth since January 2023. Inflation in 2022 The high rates of inflation in 2022 meant that the real terms value of American wages took a hit. Many Americans report feelings of concern over the economy and a worsening of their financial situation. The inflation situation in the United States is one that was experienced globally in 2022, mainly due to COVID-19 related supply chain constraints and disruption due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The monthly inflation rate for the U.S. reached a 40-year high in June 2022 at 9.1 percent, and annual inflation for 2022 reached eight percent. Without appropriate wage increases, Americans will continue to see a decline in their purchasing power. Wages in the U.S. Despite the level of wage growth reaching 6.7 percent in the summer of 2022, it has not been enough to curb the impact of even higher inflation rates. The federally mandated minimum wage in the United States has not increased since 2009, meaning that individuals working minimum wage jobs have taken a real terms pay cut for the last twelve years. There are discrepancies between states - the minimum wage in California can be as high as 15.50 U.S. dollars per hour, while a business in Oklahoma may be as low as two U.S. dollars per hour. However, even the higher wage rates in states like California and Washington may be lacking - one analysis found that if minimum wage had kept up with productivity, the minimum hourly wage in the U.S. should have been 22.88 dollars per hour in 2021. Additionally, the impact of decreased purchasing power due to inflation will impact different parts of society in different ways with stark contrast in average wages due to both gender and race.

Wages in Germany increased 2.50 percent in December of 2024 over the same month in the previous year. This dataset provides the latest reported value for - Germany Wage Growth - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic calendar, survey consensus and news.

Graph and download economic data for Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (LES1252881600Q) from Q1 1979 to Q1 2025 about full-time, salaries, workers, earnings, 16 years +, wages, median, real, employment, and USA.

Wages in Japan increased 2.30 percent in April of 2025 over the same month in the previous year. This dataset provides - Japan Wage Growth- actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news.

This package provides data and code to replicate the results in the paper: "The Broad Decline in Health and Human Capital of Americans Born after 1947"Accepted at American Economic Review: InsightsAbstract of the paper:I present evidence of a cross-cohort decline in the health and human capital of Americans, beginning with those born after 1947 and continuing until those born in the mid-1960s. Education, men’s wages, women’s maternal health (proxied by their infants’ birthweight), and mortality all exhibit trend breaks near the 1947 cohort, such that each outcome worsens for subsequent cohorts relative to prior trend. The decline is large enough to drive: i) educational declines in the 1960s, ii) increases in low birthweight in the 1980s, iii) mortality increases since 1999, and to contribute substantially to iv) wage stagnation since the 1970s.

Wages in France increased 2.10 percent in March of 2025 over the same month in the previous year. This dataset provides - France Monthly Wages Growth- actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news.

Graph and download economic data for Income Before Taxes: Wages and Salaries by Quintiles of Income Before Taxes: Lowest 20 Percent (1st to 20th Percentile) (CXU900000LB0102M) from 1984 to 2023 about percentile, salaries, tax, wages, income, and USA.

Germany had an average salary of 65.7 thousand U.S dollars per year in 2023, the highest among the five largest European economies. Germany has consistently had the highest wages in Europe over the last thirty years. Many countries in Europe experienced a significant decrease in their average wage level following the global financial crisis of 2008, with France and Germany bucking this trend by retaining robust wage growth. While British wages have stagnated since the crash, only surpassing their 2007 level in 2019, Italian and Spanish wages have in fact fallen, driven by the macroeconomic troubles of these countries since the Eurozone crisis.

These files contain all the data used in the publication "Poverty or Prosperity in Northern India? New Evidence on Real Wages, 1590s-1870s". This paper introduces a new dataset on wages in northern India (from Gujarat in the West to Bengal in the East) from the 1590s to the 1870s. It follows Allen’s subsistence basket methodology to compute internationally comparable real wages to shed light on developments in Indian living standards over time, as well as to test some of the assumptions underlying the comparative real wage methodology. It adjusts the comparative cost of living indices to take into account differences in caloric intake due to variances in heights. Furthermore, the paper discusses the male/female wage gap in northern India. We demonstrate that the Great Divergence started somewhere in the late seventeenth century. This gap widens further after the 1720s and especially after the 1800s. It is subsequently primarily England’s spurt and India’s stagnation in the first half of the nineteenth century which brought about most serious differences in the standard of living in Eurasia. If the British colonial state is to blame – as often happens in the literature on India’s persistent poverty – it is in their failure to improve the already deteriorated situation after they had become the near-undisputed masters of India since 1820.Note on v2There are two main changes compared with Version 1:1. In the sheet “PricesNEI” from the Excel file “prices_north_india.xlsx”, a faulty comma in the formula of column P, caused the average price of ghi to be calculated over 4 rather than 3 columns. This was corrected and the newly calculated series of ghi were also included in the “BasketNEI” sheet of that same file and the improved CPI was used in the calculations of the real wages. As a consequence of this change, the prices of the overall basket are increased somewhat, causing a slight downward adjustment of real wages. 2. In the sheet “PriceNOI”, for the years 1861-1930, the average price of millet (Column J) was accidentally calculated over columns F-I, rather than just column I. This has been corrected in this file and the newly computed CPI entered in the comparisons and real wages calculations. It has no observable consequences for the results. We thank Joseph Enguehard (l’École normale supérieure de Lyon) for pointing us towards these issues. Note on v3There are two changes compared with v2:1. In the file “7.global_comparisons”, sheet “cpi”, in the calculation of the 10-year averages for Beijing, London, Leipzig and Valencia, the range of years in the formula did not match with the decade in column A. This has been corrected. 2. In that same file, sheets “skilled” and “unskilled”, in the calculation of the 10-year averages, the formula for the 1680s accidently ranged from 1678-1689 instead of 1680-1689. This has been corrected. We thank Tamer Güven (Utrecht University) for pointing us towards these issues.

Wages for regular pay in the United Kingdom grew by approximately 5.6 percent in March 2025, although when adjusted for inflation, wages for regular pay only grew in real terms by 1.8 percent. Twenty months of inflation outpacing wages Between November 2021 and June 2023 inflation was higher than wage growth in the UK, resulting in falling real terms earnings throughout this 20-month period. While UK inflation peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022, it was not until April 2023 that it fell below double figures, and not until May 2024 that it reached the Bank of England's target of two percent. Forecasts from the Autumn 2024 budget predict that the annual UK inflation will for 2024 will be 2.5 percent, down from 7.3 percent in 2023 and 9.1 percent in 2022. Due to high inflation, the UK's minimum wage also rose quite significantly during this period, with the "main" rate increasing from 8.91 pounds per hour in 2021 to 12.21 pounds per hour in 2025. Average earnings and gender pay gap For full-time workers in the United Kingdom, the median average annual earnings was 37,430 British pounds in 2024, compared with 34,663 pounds in 2023. In London, average earnings were significantly higher than the rest of the country, at 47,455 pounds. Just two other areas of the United Kingdom, the South East and Scotland, had annual salaries above the UK average. North East England had the lowest average salary, at 32,960 pounds. As of 2024, the gender pay gap for median gross hourly earnings in the UK was 13.1 percent for all workers, falling to seven percent for full-time workers and -3 percent for part-time workers. Compared with 1997, when the gender pay gap was 27.5 percent for all workers, there has been a degree of progress, although, at current trends, it will be some time before the gap is closed entirely.

Wages in Australia increased 3.40 percent in March of 2025 over the same month in the previous year. This dataset provides - Australia Wage Growth- actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news.

America’s lowest earners are also its most essential workers: truck drivers, packers and shippers, grocery clerks, servers, healthcare assistants, housekeepers, and janitors. Despite working long hours in difficult jobs, many of these workers are trapped in positions with low wages and little or no prospects for advancement. Most employers believe they have policies in place to help these workers. However, a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. low-wage workers (Upward mobility survey of low-wage workers - Questionnaire) and a matching survey of 1,150 U.S. business leaders (Upward mobility survey of employers of low-wage workers - Questionnaire) show that implementation is poor. Workers don’t get the support they need in the form of mentorship, training, or career guidance. This results in stagnant wages for workers and high churn for companies. As companies struggle to fill positions in the post-Covid recovery, they will need to invest in retaining and nurturing talent—especially for the lowest earners who perform the most critical tasks.

This survey intends to fill a gap by carefully documenting the characteristics of the workers engaged in alternative work arrangements and the gig economy in the United Kingdom. We collected the data via an online survey of 20,000 respondents representative of the UK working-age population (18-65 years old). Alternative work arrangements, such as independent contractors, zero hours contract workers, temporary help agency workers and contract company workers, are a growing and increasingly important feature of the labour markets of many developed economies. However, little is known about the nature and variety of these new types of jobs in terms of employment conditions (e.g. pay, hours worked, patterns of work), workers’ characteristics including workers’ preferences for different working arrangements, and employment rights.

1) Developing Skills: Strengths and Weaknesses in the System, and What can be Done. The new Industrial Strategy must consider how the education system can create the general and specific skills needed by businesses today and in the future. CEP will synthesise evidence on strengths and weaknesses in the current education system at all levels (schools, colleges and universities), and highlight where improvements can be made. This might be within the current system, or through the design of new mechanisms to incentivise individuals and firms to invest in training. In conjunction with researchers from the Centre for Vocational Education Research (CVER), we can produce a synthesis of findings on technical and vocational education. We will also be able to study in more depth firm-level relationships with higher education institutions, with the aim of better understanding how they impact on local economies. 2) Driving Growth across the Country: Mapping the Data on Firms and Labour Markets. The starting point for developing appropriate regionally focused growth policies is to understand the status quo, to carefully document how this has changed over time, and to better understand the factors underlying and driving geographic differences. The CEP is developing better data to describe the geographic spread of industry, and associated variation in labour market patterns like problems of real wage stagnation and the rise of new types of work arrangements, including the gig economy. As well as analysis of the digital economy, and the opportunities and threats it poses for the labour market and implications for the future. We will seek to release reports describing the data, map the relevant metrics (including productivity, investment, employment and pay) so that policymakers and stakeholders could benchmark their own regions/sectors. 3) Supporting Businesses to Start and Grow: Drivers of Innovation and Diffusion. The Industrial Strategy should be focused on addressing market failures which cause barriers to investment in innovation, technologies or organisational practices that drive productivity growth. One strand of work using patents will analyse the innovation spill overs between technologies and places, and the types of policy that stimulate business RD and innovation. The spill over analysis would also be linked with new measures of regional Total Factor Productivity (TFP) to understand the local economic impact of innovation. This work will help guide policymakers to where the payoffs of RD investment might be greatest for the UK. In this context, we would consider payoffs both in terms of economic growth but also in terms of achieving non-economic objectives such as lower greenhouse gas emissions and more secure energy supply. We also plan to produce a report together with the LSE's Grantham Institute on clean growth. Another strand of work will consider the role of financial constraints on firm growth, and the extent to which these have contributed to recent poor productivity performance in the UK. And finally, we will explore the relationships between management practices and investment efficiency. 4) Encouraging Trade and Inward Investment: Brexit and Industrial Strategy. Many UK firms (particularly SMEs) face longstanding barriers to exporting, and Brexit will create new challenges in this area. At the same time, while UK Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) performance has been stronger to date, there are concerns that Brexit will induce multinationals to relocate in order to maintain access to the single market. CEP will seek to understand the likely trade and FDI impacts of Brexit, and the implications for labour markets and consumers. This will include a deeper analysis of the sectoral and regional dimensions, and should be useful to inform the scope and form of industrial policy response.

Between 1914 and 1969, weekly wages in manufacturing industries in the United States grew by a factor of 12. In the first half of the century, the most significant periods of increase came during the World Wars, as manufacturing industries were at the core of the war effort. However, wages then fell sharply after both World Wars, due to post-war recessions and oversaturation of the job market as soldiers returned home. Interwar period Wage growth during the interwar period was often stagnant, despite the significant economic growth during the Roarin' 20s, and manufacturing wages remained steady at around 24 dollars from 1923 to 1929. This was, again, due to oversaturation of the job market, as employment in the agricultural sector declined due to mechanization and many rural workers flocked to industrial cities in search of employment. The Great Depression then saw the largest and most prolonged period of decline in manufacturing wages. From September 1929 to March 1933, weekly wages fell from 24 dollars to below 15 dollars, and it would take another four years for them to return to pre-Depression levels. Postwar prosperity After the 1945 Recession, the decades that followed the Second World War then saw consistent growth in manufacturing wages in almost every year, as the U.S. cemented itself as the foremost economic power in the world. This period is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of Capitalism, and the U.S. strengthened its economic presence in Western Europe and other OECD countries, while expanding its political and military presence across Asia. Manufacturing and exports played a major role in the U.S.' economic growth in this period, and wages grew from roughly 40 dollars per week in 1945 to more than 120 dollars by the late 1960s.

In the three months to March 2025, average weekly earnings in the United Kingdom grew by 5.6 percent, while pay including bonuses grew by 5.5 percent, when compared with the same period leading to March 2024. In the same month, the inflation rate for the Consumer Price Index was 2.6 percent, indicating that wages were rising faster than prices that month. Average salaries in the UK In 2024, the average salary for full-time workers in the UK was 37,430 British pounds a year, up from 34,963 in the previous year. In London, the average annual salary was far higher than the rest of the country, at 47,455 pounds per year, compared with just 32,960 in North East England. There also still exists a noticeable gender pay gap in the UK, which was seven percent for full-time workers in 2024, down from 7.5 percent in 2023. Lastly, the monthly earnings of the top one percent in the UK was 15,887 pounds as of November 2024, far higher than even that of the average for the top five percent, who earned 7,641 pounds per month, while pay for the lowest 10 percent of earners was just 805 pounds per month. Waves of industrial action in the UK One of the main consequences of high inflation and low wage growth throughout 2022 and 2023 was an increase in industrial action in the UK. In December 2022, for example, there were approximately 830,000 working days lost due to labor disputes. Throughout this month, workers across various industry sectors were involved in industrial disputes, such as nurses, train drivers, and driving instructors. Many of the workers who took part in strikes were part of the UK's public sector, which saw far weaker wage growth than that of the private sector throughout 2022. Widespread industrial action continued into 2023, with approximately 303,000 workers involved in industrial disputes in March 2023. There was far less industrial action by 2024, however, due to settlements in many of the disputes, although some are ongoing as of 2025.

The Dominican Republic's growth model has led to exceptional economic expansion, far exceeding the LAC average over the past two decades, but it is reaching its limits due to slow productivity growth. While impressive, the Dominican Republic’s growth performance has been based on factor accumulation rather than productivity growth and associated with regional disparities and wage stagnation. Productivity growth has been hindered by policy distortions, climate-related natural disasters as well as inadequate human capital. A new round of structural reforms will boost productivity growth, including by: (i) unleashing its human capital potential; (ii) fomenting competitive markets; (iii) revamping the innovation strategy; (iv) reducing public expenditure inefficiencies; and (v) strengthening resilience against external shocks and climate change.

Japanese households had an average annual income of approximately 5.3 million Japanese yen in 2024, constituting an increase of 1.5 percent compared to the previous year. Stagnant wages and regional income disparitiesHousehold income refers to the combined gross income of all household members aged 15 years and older, regardless of relation. While the average number of household members was 2.25 in 2022, there were only about 1.05 earners per household. A look at the time series reveals that the average income stagnated in the last ten years. Japan’s well-beingOften cited with family income and per capita income, the annual average household income is a useful economic indicator of a country’s living standard and individual wealth. In terms of well-being, Japan’s performance is mixed compared to other OECD countries. While low labor market insecurity and a high employment rate indicate Japan is performing well relative to other OECD countries, average earnings, as well as household net adjusted disposable income were lower than the OECD average.

Graph and download economic data for Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (LEU0252881600A) from 1979 to 2024 about full-time, salaries, workers, earnings, 16 years +, wages, median, real, employment, and USA.