by Wendy Edelberg
The Brookings Institution
There are various ways to evaluate recent trends in real pay (i.e., nominal pay adjusted for inflation), including using different measures of pay, measures of inflation, and reference periods. These factors can lead to conflicting conclusions about the trends in real pay in the United States. In October 2023, we published a detailed analysis breaking down these differences.
The interactive below shows you the annualized percent change in real pay from a base fourth quarter of your choice to the most recent quarter with available data. For each time period of your choice, this interactive will show you the change in real pay using four different pay measures and two different inflation measures. You can hover over the legend or the bars themselves to see percent changes in pay. The title of each figure will show the time period over which the change is calculated.