Weekly Earnings: Annual Averages

Reading this table

Table 7 is the annual companion to the quarterly tables: the annual average of median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers, for the two most recent calendar years, with the number of workers in thousands. The current dollars columns are the medians as reported; the constant (1982-84) dollars columns divide them by the CPI-U so that the two years are on the same price basis, with 1982 to 1984 as the base period, which is why the constant figures are about a third of the current ones. The dollar level of a constant-dollar figure has no meaning on its own; only the comparison between years does.

Read BLS's note before comparing the years: the 2025 annual estimates are 11-month averages that exclude October, because October 2025 data were not collected during the federal government shutdown, and BLS states they are not strictly comparable with other years' annual averages. The race groups do not sum to the total and Hispanic or Latino workers may be of any race. The same definitions apply as elsewhere in the release: earnings before deductions at the main job, full-time meaning 35 hours or more, median by interpolation within $50 intervals. The quarterly page gives every quarter since 2017 in both dollar bases, and the Learn explainer covers constant-dollar conversion.