Inflation Has Wiped Out Average Wage Gains During the Pandemic (maybe)

The latest CPI inflation report didn’t have a huge surprise in the headline number, with 8.3% being very similar to last month. But with the two most recent months of data, we can now see something very unfortunate in the data: cumulative inflation during the pandemic as measured by the CPI-U (11.6%) has now almost matched average wage growth (12.0%), as measured by the average wage for all private workers. I start in January 2020 for the pre-pandemic baseline.

What this means is that inflation-adjusted wages in the US are no greater than they were before the pandemic. They are almost identical to what they were in February 2020 (just 2 cents greater). But as regular readers will know, the CPI-U isn’t the only measure of inflation, and there’s good reason to believe it’s not the best. One alternative is the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. Cumulative inflation for the PCE is slightly lower during the pandemic (9.0%, though we don’t have April 2022 data yet).

This chart shows average wage growth adjusted with both of these different measures of inflation, expressed as a percent of January 2020 wages. The CPI-U adjusted wages (blue line) have been falling steadily since the beginning of 2021, though the declines have accelerated in 2022. The PCE-adjusted wages (orange line) have also not performed superbly, but at least they are still 2-3% above January 2020. Still, the picture is not rosy: they’ve basically been flat since mid-2020 and have started to drop in early 2022.

Of course, average (mean) numbers can be tricky and sometimes misleading. What if instead we used median wages? Unfortunately, there is no hourly median wage data that is updated every month. The closest data that I usually look at is median weekly earnings, which is available on a quarterly basis. Here’s what that data looks like, expressed as a percent of the first quarter of 2020. I limit the data to full-time workers, since that should give us a roughly comparable number to the hourly data (hours of work may have changed, but using full-time workers should make it roughly constant).

For median weekly earnings, we can see that the picture is even less rosy. Median earnings have been declining consistently since the second quarter of 2020, regardless of which inflation adjustment we use. The decline in the PCE-adjusted measure isn’t quite as steep since early 2021, but both figures are below the pre-pandemic level, and have been for the past two quarters.

One final note: if we look at weekly earnings across the distribution, and not just at the median, we see something very interesting. Earnings at the bottom of the distribution seem to be performing better than those at the top. In fact, the 10th percentile weekly wage is the only category that is still above pre-pandemic levels. I’m only adjusting using the CPI-U here, but the patterns for the PCE-adjusted earnings would be roughly similar.

We should be cautious about interpreting this data too: if workers dropping out of the labor force are primarily at the bottom of the distribution, it will artificially push up the 10th percentile earnings level. It would be good to know how much of that is going on here. Still, I think this is an important result in the current data.