monthly · indexed (100 = first period)

Wages vs consumer prices

Name: Wages vs consumer prices
Creator: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)
License: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

Have private-sector hourly earnings kept pace with consumer prices?

Average hourly earnings

CPI-U

Wages vs consumer prices: summary statistics (Max range)
Series	First	Latest	Min	Max
Average hourly earnings	100.0	187.8	100.0	187.8
CPI-U	100.0	166.5	100.0	167.2

Source:Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)CES0500000003 CPIAUCSL· Data may be revised by the source.

FormulaIndex CES0500000003 and CPIAUCSL to 100 at the first shared month; real wage = wage index / CPI index × 100

Methodology

Average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees (CES0500000003) and the CPI-U headline index (CPIAUCSL), both monthly, rebased to 100 at the first shared month. A real-wage index is shown as a summary callout: it rises when wages outpace prices and falls when prices outpace wages.

Source series

CES0500000003Average hourly earningsDollars per HourMonthly · Seasonally Adjusted CPIAUCSLCPI-UIndex 1982-1984=100Monthly · Seasonally Adjusted

Freshness

Data through: June 2026
Last refreshed: 23 Jul 2026
Native frequency: monthly

The site is refreshed separately from the source. Data through = the latest observation published by FRED; last refreshed = when PIER20 last fetched the file.

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Wages vs consumer prices

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