What are real wages?
Real wages are pay measured by what it buys, after price increases are taken out. If your pay rises more slowly than prices over the same year, your real wage fell: the bigger paycheck buys less than the old one did.
Updated
Where you’ll see the word
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A pay story in the news
Compares the year's raises with the year's price increases. When pay wins, real wages rose.
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A BLS report
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes real earnings every month in its Real Earnings release, and the quarterly series on this page.
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Your raise letter
The number in the letter is before inflation.
What real wages mean for you
Weekly pay is the measure here, and weekly pay moves with hours as well as wages: fewer hours lower it even when the hourly rate holds. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also publishes an hourly measure, which answers a different question.
The figures are in 1982–84 dollars, the price level the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses as its base, so $370 isn't a paycheck you'd recognize. The direction is what matters: up means pay outran prices, and down means prices won.
The national figure won't match your own paycheck. To see whether your pay kept up, set your raise against the inflation rate on our inflation page.
Questions about real wages
What's the difference between real and nominal wages?
Nominal is the dollar figure on your pay stub. Real is that figure after inflation is taken out. A nominal raise can still be a real pay cut.
What does 'typical' mean in this chart?
Half of full-time wage and salary workers earn more than the figure and half earn less. It's the worker in the middle, not the average, so a few very high earners don't pull it up.
Are the earnings before or after taxes?
Before. The series records usual weekly earnings before taxes and other deductions, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' definition.
Our pages that use it
- Wage growth versus inflation →Pay growth set beside price growth, month by month.
- Inflation →The price side of the comparison.
Related terms
- InflationA rise in the overall level of prices over time.
- Purchasing PowerThe goods and services purchasable with a given amount of money.
- Cost of LivingHow much money it takes to cover basic expenses, such as housing, food and transportation, in a given place at a given time.
- Wage StagnationA period when inflation-adjusted wages fail to rise.
Sources and method
The card and chart use BLS series LES1252881600Q, real median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers 16 and over, delivered through FRED. It is seasonally adjusted and expressed in 1982–84 dollars. Quarterly figures print as whole dollars; exact values are in the downloadable CSV.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · Real Earnings, at bls.gov
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · Real earnings and the purchasing power of pay, at bls.gov
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data retrieved via FRED · Real Median Weekly Earnings, at fred.stlouisfed.org
We write with assistance from AI tools. Figures come from the data and sources named on this page.