Weekly Earnings by Age, Race and Sex

Reading these tables

BLS prints Table 3 as one table in five blocks, all workers and then each race and ethnicity group, each block giving the age bands for all, men and women; they are shown here as five tables. Usual weekly earnings are what a wage and salary worker usually earns per week at the main job before deductions, including usual overtime, tips and commissions; full-time means usually 35 hours or more a week; the median is the point half of the group earns more than, interpolated within $50 intervals. The number of workers is in thousands. Quarterly averages, not seasonally adjusted, current dollars.

The age bands nest: 16 and over splits into 16 to 24 and 25 and over, and 25 and over into 25 to 54 and 55 and over, with 16 to 19 and 20 to 24 under the youngest band. As BLS's note says, the race groups shown do not sum to the total because not every group is published, and people of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity may be of any race. The figures describe what each group is paid; they do not hold occupation, education, hours or region constant, so a gap between two medians is not a measure of pay for the same work. The deciles and quartiles page gives the distribution for the same groups, and the pay-gap explainer covers what a ratio of medians does and does not say.