October 27, 2011 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)
Median weekly earnings, third quarter 2011
Median weekly earnings of the nation's 101.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $753 in the third quarter of 2011 (not seasonally adjusted). Women who usually worked full time had median weekly earnings of $673, or 81.4 percent of the $827 median for men.
![Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers, not seasonally adjusted, third quarter 2011](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120925053419im_/http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2011/ted_20111027.png)
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The female-to-male earnings ratio varied by race and ethnicity. White women earned 82.5 percent as much as their male counterparts, whereas the comparable ratios were 90.2 percent for African American women, 70.1 percent for Asian women, and 92.9 percent for Hispanic women.
Among the major race and ethnicity groups, median weekly earnings for black men working at full-time jobs were $661 per week, or 78.0 percent of the median for white men ($847). The difference was smaller among women, as black women's median earnings ($596) were 85.3 percent of those for white women ($699). Overall, median earnings of Hispanics who worked full time ($545) were lower than those of blacks ($616), whites ($772), and Asians ($869).
The $753 median for all full-time wage and salary workers in the third quarter of 2011 was 1.8 percent higher than it was a year earlier, while the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 3.8 percent over the same period.
These data on earnings are from the Current Population Survey. To learn more, see "Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers — Third Quarter 2011" (HTML) (PDF), news release USDL-11-1501.
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