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FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF SAN FRANCISCO
E C O N O M I C

R E S E A R CH

INDICATORS AND DATA

Wage Rigidity Meter
The statistics on this page offer a closer examination of the annual wage
changes of U.S. workers that have not changed jobs over the year. They include
graphs of the fraction of workers receiving a wage change of zero in several
demographic subgroups of the U.S. labor force, as well as a histogram showing
all of the reported wage changes among these workers in the last four quarters.
The data for these statistics are drawn from a matched Current Population Survey
dataset (see Daly, Hobijn, Wiles 2011 for details on the matching procedure). The
Current Population Survey is a monthly nationally representative survey
conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The summary statistics on this page
will be updated on a quarterly frequency.

The above chart displays the percentage of workers who saw no change in their wage over the past year. This statistic is calculated
for all workers, for workers paid at an hourly rate, and for non-hourly workers.

Estimates of the percent of workers with a rigid wage in time series charts are averages of monthly rates taken over a 12-month
period. In the histogram and the table below, all observations over a 12-month period are pooled and then used to calculate the
percent of rigid wages. Estimates from these two methods may differ very slightly.

Distribution of Nominal Wage Changes
4-Quarter Average

2015Q1

2015Q2

2015Q3

2015Q4

2016Q1

Difference of log wage from one year prior

4-Quarter Average

2015Q1

2015Q2

2015Q3

2015Q4

2016Q1

25th Percentile

-0.017

-0.014

-0.012

-0.013

-0.014

Median

0.025

0.026

0.027

0.026

0.026

75th Percentile

0.108

0.111

0.118

0.118

0.119

Percentage of workers reporting a wage change of zero
15.38

15.38

15.11

15.31

14.83

References
Daly, Mary C., Bart Hobijn, and Brian Lucking. 2012. Why Has Wage Growth Stayed
Strong? FRBSF Economic Letter 2012-11 (April 2).
Daly, Mary C., Bart Hobijn, and Theodore S. Wiles. 2011. Dissecting Aggregate
Real Wage Fluctuations: Individual Wage Growth and the Composition Effect
FRBSF Working Paper 2011-23.
Nominal Wage Rigidity Data Release (Excel document, 67 kb)
Find out when data are updated through our Twitter page:
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Contact Mary.Daly (at) sf.frb.org