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FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF SAN FRANCISCO
E C O NO MIC

R ESEAR 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

2018Q2

2018Q3

2018Q4

2019Q1

2019Q2

Difference of log wage from one year prior
25th Percentile

-0.008

-0.003

-0.002

-0.008

-0.004

Median

0.030

0.031

0.034

0.034

0.036

75th Percentile

0.118

0.118

0.119

0.123

0.125

Percentage of workers reporting a wage change of zero
14.35

14.37

13.94

13.30

13.19

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)
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Contact Amber.Flaharty (at) sf.frb.org