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FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF SAN
FRANCISCO
ECON OM IC

RES EA RCH

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

2018Q1

2018Q2

2018Q3

2018Q4

2019Q1

Difference of log wage from one year prior
25th Percentile

-0.008

-0.008

-0.003

-0.002

-0.008

Median

0.029

0.030

0.031

0.034

0.034

75th Percentile

0.118

0.118

0.118

0.119

0.123

Percentage of workers reporting a wage change of
zero
14.71

14.35

14.37

13.94

13.30

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 Amber.Flaharty (at) sf.frb.org