Prices against pay · which workers · Sep 19, 2026

Did pay beat prices? It depends who you are.

Did your pay beat prices since 2019?

1:40 video. Every figure in it comes from the checked story data.

What the video says

Did your pay beat prices since 2019?
Two official numbers answer that, from the same agency, and they disagree.
Same window. Same agency. Two answers.
Pay rose 35.7%. Or 28.9%.
A gap of 6.8 points.
The difference is who gets counted.
One follows production and nonsupervisory workers, about four fifths of private payrolls. The other follows everyone, at every level of the ladder.
So the answer flips on the things you buy most.
Groceries: 2.5% cheaper against one, 2.7% dearer against the other.
Rent and Housing flip the same way. 3 of 8 change sign.
Five answers do not flip.
Gasoline, Power bills and Eating out outran pay either way.
Medical care and Used cars did not, either way. Those are the five you can state plainly.
On the things you notice most, it depends who you are.
Not a disagreement about prices. A disagreement about whose hour you are counting.
What this does not tell you.
Neither number is your pay, so in work terms it is ESTIMATED for any one person. Nothing here says why a price moved: MISSING. And what anyone believed was happening: MISSING — not measured here.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — consumer prices, average hourly earnings, and the Employment Cost Index.
Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Not investment advice.

Marks open only as wide as each input’s evidence class allows. See Method.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) item indexes, U.S. city average, seasonally adjusted (public domain)
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private (AHETPI) and Employment Cost Index: Wages and Salaries: Private Industry Workers (ECIWAG), retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (public domain; the FRED notice travels with the piece)
Measure: in work terms = (1 + price change) / (1 + wage change) - 1, over a fixed window
Scope: Average hourly earnings are for production and nonsupervisory employees, not all workers, and are an average rather than any one person's pay.
Scope: CPI item indexes are U.S. city averages, seasonally adjusted, and measure a category as a whole rather than any one household's basket.
Scope: Nothing here says why a price moved, and nothing here is what anyone believed at the time.
Scope: Whether pay beat prices depends on which workers you mean. Against the average wage for production and nonsupervisory employees, pay ran ahead; against a fixed-composition index covering all private workers, it did not, and three categories change sign between them.
Notice: This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Voice: generated voice, reading the on-screen lines
Music: Ben Elson / Callisto 8 / courtesy of Epidemic Sound

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Backtests and model estimates on historical data. Not investment advice.