Real Weekly Earnings Down in Q3

Overall, for HS graduates:

Figure 1: Real median weekly wages for all production and nonsupervisory workers (blue), for high school graduates (2nd quartile) (red), in logs 2024Q4=0. NBER defined peak to trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: BLS, NBER, and author’s calculations.

5 thoughts on “Real Weekly Earnings Down in Q3”

  1. James Harold McClure

    Real Weekly Earnings are below the level when Trump took office. Of course people like Hassert and Bennett keep telling us that they are rising quickly. Liars gotta lie.

  2. RT

    Good to see the high school grad series broken out next to the production and nonsupervisory line, since that covers a lot of the trades. We run a job board for traveling trades workers, and the pay we see posted moves faster than the survey numbers do. Traveling journeyman electricians are still running about $35-45 an hour plus $100-125 a day in per diem on plant and data center work. Since the BLS series come out months behind the postings, we keep a running read on what trades jobs are advertising for pay right now. Curious whether you expect Q4 to turn back up or keep sliding.

    1. Macroduck

      At $35 – $45 per hour, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that’s $72,800 – $93,600 per year, excluding per diem (which should be excluded). I know hours swing all over the place, but that’s in the ballpark.

      Good for them. You can live on that.

    2. joseph

      There are about 500,000 journeyman electricians in the country. There are about 400 data centers under construction in the country. Not sure how significant that is, but as previously pointed out, this is crowding out other potential construction projects which may be local. Traveling electricians would need to be willing to be away from their families for perhaps weeks or months at a time.

  3. Daniel Oliveira

    The corporate side of this shows up on earnings calls. I count words on S&P 500 calls, and last quarter “affordable” or “affordability” came up on 25.6% of them, the highest share since at least the start of 2024, including every utility call and 19 of 30 consumer staples calls. Talk of an actual recession went the other way: 2 of 477 calls, against 93 in spring 2025. Executives describe customers who still have jobs but whose pay doesn’t stretch as far, which is about what this chart shows.

    https://equibles.com/research/recession-talk-has-vanished-from-earnings-calls

Comments are closed.