The median would be interesting than the mean, as you can be hollowing out the middle, leaving more low-wage workers and a few very highly paid ones and the "average" still looks good.
Median weekly earnings of the nation's 121.0 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,235 in the first quarter of 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.
