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FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF
SAN FRANCISCO
ECONOMIC

RESEARCH

I N D I C ATO R S A N D D ATA

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 12month 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

2017Q1 2017Q2 2017Q3 2017Q4 2018Q1

Difference of log wage from one year prior
25th
Percentile

-0.008

-0.01

-0.01

-0.013

-0.008

Median

0.031

0.029

0.029

0.028

0.029

75th
Percentile

0.124

0.119

0.119

0.118

0.118

Percentage of workers reporting a wage
change of zero
13.76

14.26

14.41

14.49

14.71

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, 68 kb)

Find out when data are updated through our Twitter page:
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Contact Mary.Daly (at) sf.frb.org