Pay bought 0.3% less than a year ago (August 2026)
Average hourly earnings rose 3.1% in the year to August 2026, while consumer prices rose 3.4%. Prices outpaced pay, so the average hour of work buys slightly less than it did a year ago. Civic Forecast calculation from Bureau of Labor Statistics average hourly earnings and the Consumer Price Index, comparing growth factors rather than subtracting the two rates.
Induced by API Automations for Civic Forecast from federal open data. Each finding names the datasets it was computed from. How this is calculated.