Thread by Aaron Sojourner

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For the younger half of U.S. workers, their own wages have grown faster over the year on average than consumer prices (CPI-U: +7.5% into last 3 months), much faster for the youngest workers.

Middle and older age workers' wage growth tended to lag CPI by a few percentage points.
Analysis launches off from @AtlantaFed Wage Growth Tracker (WGT). Follows those employed both in a recent month & 12 months prior, computes over-year wage growth rate for each, & describes growth rate distribution for various groups.
Mean wage growth across all such workers into the last 3 months (Dec21-Feb22) at 7.7% is fastest in 25 years & accelerating. CPI-U ⬆️ 7.5% over same.

Median wage growth (5.8%) & 75th %tile (17.9%) fastest in 25 years & accelerating too. 25th %tile (-0.1%) near series high.
WGT publishes trends in median wage growth rate for 3 age groups.

To smooth noise in a month's median, it pools over-the-year growth into last 12 months & plots that trend.

At 11.4%, growth for age 16-24 is highest in last 25 years by that measure.
www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
This replicates that basic analysis but splits the 25-54 age into 4 subgroups.
That recent acceleration for the youngest workers when pooling over 12 months (red as in prior graph) masks even faster median growth when pooling over just growth into the most-recent 3 months (blue).
For age 25-54 workers, growth has accelerated a lot recently. The most recent 3 months looks a lot different than the most recent 12.

Their median growth rate into most recent 3 months is 6.1%. Average likely higher.
For older workers, starting to see acceleration but still quite low.
Among workers aged 16-29, both job stayers and job switchers are seeing median growth over 10% into recent months.

Both series are at highest level in 25 years.
For age 30-44, median wage growth also at 25-year highs for both switchers & stayers, both accelerating in recent months, but both below CPI-U.
For age 45-59, stayers recently seeing acceleration and getting fastest increases in 20 years.

Switchers are not.
Not much action for older workers, though maybe recent acceleration for stayers. Noisy.
By sector, median within-worker growth fastest in trade and transportation and leisure and hospitality.
Median wage growth for non-Hispanic white workers and for other workers are each at their highest level in 25 years.

Both groups experiencing wage acceleration recently, especially workers of color.
Arin's analysis is a bit different:

- growth rates by wage, rather than age,
- including all workers & adjusting for observables (not focusing just on change in person among folks employed a year prior, as I did), &
- looking over 3 time ranges.

Update: @AtlantaFed Wage Growth Tracker for most current month finds Zoomers' wages continue zooming, wage growth accelerates to 11.8% from 11.4% in prior report.
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