According to the Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker, a new series constructed using data from the Current Population Survey, the median increase in wages for individuals working in May 2014 and May 2015 was 3.3 percent (reported as a three-month average).
Wage growth by this measure was essentially unchanged from April and 1 percentage point higher than the year-ago reading. The current pace of nominal hourly wage growth is similar to that seen during the labor market recovery of 2003–04 and about a percentage point below the pace experienced during 2006–07, which was the peak of the last business cycle. You can download the data going back to March 1997 from our website by clicking "export," shown in the upper right of the chart below.
Wage growth differs by job and worker characteristics. For prime-age individuals and full-time employees, for example, the Wage Growth Tracker recorded slightly higher readings than the group overall. The median wage growth of these individuals was 3.5 percent compared to 3.3 percent for all individuals. To see more cuts of the data, check out our website.
By John Robertson, a senior policy adviser in the Atlanta Fed's research department, and
Ellyn Terry, an economic policy analysis specialist in the Atlanta Fed's research department