Average versus median US national wage graph

The national average salary (or national average wage) is the

mean A mean is a quantity representing the "center" of a collection of numbers and is intermediate to the extreme values of the set of numbers. There are several kinds of means (or "measures of central tendency") in mathematics, especially in statist ...

salary A salary is a form of periodic payment from an employer to an employee, which may be specified in an employment contract. It is contrasted with piece wages, where each job, hour or other unit is paid separately, rather than on a periodic basis. ...

for the working

population Population is a set of humans or other organisms in a given region or area. Governments conduct a census to quantify the resident population size within a given jurisdiction. The term is also applied to non-human animals, microorganisms, and pl ...

of a nation. It is calculated by summing all the annual salaries of all persons in work (surveyed) and dividing the total by the number of workers (surveyed). It is not the same as the

Gross domestic product Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the total market value of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country or countries. GDP is often used to measure the economic performanc ...

(GDP)

per capita ''Per capita'' is a Latin phrase literally meaning "by heads" or "for each head", and idiomatically used to mean "per person". Social statistics The term is used in a wide variety of social science, social sciences and statistical research conte ...

, which is calculated by dividing the GDP by the total population of a country, including the

unemployed Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is the proportion of people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for Work (hu ...

and those not in the

workforce In macroeconomics, the workforce or labour force is the sum of people either working (i.e., the employed) or looking for work (i.e., the unemployed): \text = \text + \text Those neither working in the marketplace nor looking for work are out ...

(e.g. retired people, children, students, etc.). It can be useful in understanding economic conditions, and to employers and employees in negotiating salaries. The national

median The median of a set of numbers is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a Sample (statistics), data sample, a statistical population, population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as the “ ...

salary is usually significantly less than the national average salary because the distribution of workers by salary is

skewed In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable about its mean. The skewness value can be positive, zero, negative, or undefined. For a unimodal ...

Examples of usage

* The

United States Social Security Administration The United States Social Security Administration (SSA) is an Independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government that administers Social Security (United ...

calculates a "national average wage index", used to index past wages of workers by multiplying them by the ratio of the current wage index to the wage index at the time the wages were earned, for the purposes of benefit calculations. The wage index is updated every year by multiplying it by the percentage the US national average wage has changed that year.

Statistics

List of countries by average wage The average wage is a measure of total income after taxes divided by total number of employees employed. In this article, the average wage is adjusted for living expenses "purchasing power parity" (PPP). This is not to be confused with the averag ...

* List of countries in Europe by average wage

References

{{Global economic classifications Wages and salaries

Examples of usage

Statistics

See also

References