How much (more) money we're making – September 2019
Bottom Line: In today's third story breaking down the employment report we'll look at the fun stuff...how much more money we're making. The average hourly wage for all Americans is currently $28.11. With an average work week of 34.4 hours, the average income is now$50,283. That’s $381 more than a month ago because hourly earnings rose and the average work week rose slightly. The average person is working a little more and earning more money for the time they are working.
Here are the details:
- Earnings are up +11 cents per hour
- +3.2% year over year
- Average person is earning $2,546 more than a year ago
- Average income now $50,283
More great news within the job’s report. Not only are we making record high wages – for the first time in American history the average income is over $50,000 per year. That’s awesome. Just as we saw with records being shattered for minority employment in August, we’re seeing incomes continuing to soar. Simply put, we’re nowhere close to a recession with this report, in fact – based on us, consumers, the case could be made for economic strengthening through year end. Consumer spending making up about 70% of the US economy – it's obvious why the economy has been strong and there’s enough here to see that there’s still room for optimism going forward.
It’s never the case that the headline unemployment rate and jobs added or lost will tell the whole story, but that’s especially true once again this month. If you stopped with the headline numbers from the jobs report you’d be left with an incomplete picture. By breaking it all down we see that we had a lot of news over the past month. Including...
- Only five months in American history with a lower real unemployment rate
- Record low Black and Hispanic unemployment rates for the 3rd straight month
- Female unemployment lower than male unemployment for the first time ever
- An acceleration of income growth with record income above $50k
Good stuff. There are two sides to stories and one side to facts. I’ll continue to provide you with the facts and keep you ahead of the curve.