{"id":78773,"date":"2025-08-13T04:01:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T04:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/78773\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T04:01:03","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T04:01:03","slug":"wage-growth-stalls-for-low-income-workers-after-boom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/78773\/","title":{"rendered":"Wage Growth Stalls for Low-Income Workers After Boom"},"content":{"rendered":"

After years of rapid wage growth for low-income workers in the United States, a slowdown has set in, The Wall Street Journal reported<\/a> Monday (Aug. 11).<\/p>\n

According to the latest government jobs report, average earnings for workers in the leisure\/hospitality space rose 3.5% year over year, to $22.83 per hour, the report said. The average earnings for workers in the information sector increased 5.4%, to $52.61 per hour.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a shift from December 2021, when leisure\/hospitality workers \u2014 the lowest paid workers in the groups tracked by the Department of Labor<\/a> \u2014 were up 14%, per the report. Meanwhile, well-paid information sector workers saw their wages go up by less than 2% during the same month.<\/p>\n

The pandemic played a part in wage growth for low-paid workers, the report said. When the shutdown began, employers cut swaths of workers at hotels, restaurants and retail stores. When those businesses reopened, they had a demand for staff<\/a>, letting workers in low-wage roles command better pay.<\/p>\n

That trend seems to be over. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta<\/a> showed that wage growth for the lowest-paid<\/a> quarter of U.S. workers \u2014 people earning roughly less than $806 each week \u2014 slowed to an annual rate of 3.7% in June.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s down from a peak of 7.5% in late 2022, a time of severe post-pandemic labor shortages in industries like hospitality.<\/p>\n

Wage growth has also slowed for high-paid workers, although not as much, the central bank found. Wages for the top quarter of U.S. workers \u2014 people taking home $1,887 a week \u2014 climbed 4.7% in the year to June, and for the overall workforce by 4.3%.<\/p>\n

Precarious financial situations continue to be the norm for many U.S. consumers, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report \u201cConsumers Say They Want Budgeting Tools but Aren\u2019t Using Them<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Index hit a new high of 68.4% in May, showing 684 out of every 1,000 consumers spending their monthly income on essential payments, with nearly a quarter saying they struggled to pay their bills.<\/p>\n

Further PYMNTS Intelligence research showed a gender gap<\/a> in how paycheck-to-paycheck consumers manage their monthly finances. When asked if they could stop living paycheck to paycheck if their earnings remained flat but their spending changed, nearly a third of men said \u201cabsolutely,\u201d while fewer than 20% of women said the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After years of rapid wage growth for low-income workers in the United States, a slowdown has set in,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101,20730,134,3,3300,4322,14444,3301],"class_list":{"0":"post-78773","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-hospitality","11":"tag-jobs","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-pymnts-news","14":"tag-restaurants","15":"tag-wages","16":"tag-whats-hot"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}