Real Earnings: Hourly and Weekly

Reading these tables

The Real Earnings release combines two BLS programs. Average hourly earnings and average weekly hours come from the Current Employment Statistics survey of payroll records; they are averages over all employees on private nonfarm payrolls (Table A-1) or over production and nonsupervisory employees (Table A-2), so a change can reflect a change in the mix of jobs as much as a change in anyone's pay rate. Average weekly earnings is hourly earnings times weekly hours.

Real earnings divide the current-dollar figure by a consumer price index and express the result in 1982-84 dollars, the index base period: the CPI-U for all employees and the CPI-W (urban wage earners and clerical workers) for production and nonsupervisory employees, as the footnotes state. A real figure rises when earnings grow faster than prices and falls when they grow more slowly; the dollar amount itself is only meaningful relative to other months. The over-the-month and over-the-year blocks are percent changes computed by BLS from unrounded data, so they may not match a change computed from the rounded figures shown. "(p)" marks preliminary figures that are revised in the next two releases. Seasonally adjusted.