Oregon Hourly Earnings Surpass Inflation
December 24, 2024Earnings in Oregon increased substantially over the past year, surpassing the rate of inflation. Total private average hourly earnings increased by 4.9% between November 2023 and November 2024. This growth rate was higher than the comparable national growth in private earnings of 4.0% in that same 12-month period, and faster than the U.S. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (U.S. CPI-U) which rose 2.7% during that time.
The accompanying chart shows the percent growth in average hourly earnings for the major private-sector industries in Oregon. Most of these industries saw rapid hourly earnings gains and all but two rose by between 4.2% and 7.3%. The exceptions were financial activities, which dropped by 3.3%, and educational and health services, which rose 2.2%.
The factors causing these rapid gains in hourly earnings are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that wages have increased faster than they did during the couple of decades prior to 2020.
Looking back over a dozen years shows that private-sector average hourly earnings in Oregon rose from a little more than $22 per hour in 2013 to about $36 per hour in late 2024. Meanwhile, at the national level, hourly earnings rose from about $24 to nearly $36 during that time. So, Oregon started out in 2013 below the U.S. but recently passed the U.S. average and has continued to increase, according to this metric that is based on the monthly survey of businesses.
If wage increases in the U.S. had matched the rate of inflation throughout this period, wages would have only risen to about $32 per hour by late 2024. This means that overall inflation was below the rate of wage gains between the starting point of 2013 and the end point in 2024. However, this pattern wasn’t consistent throughout the 12-year period. A careful study of the chart shows that consumer price inflation was more rapid than U.S. wage growth during mid-2021 through late-2024, when consumer prices spiked dramatically during much of 2021 and 2022, then cooled its rate of increase lately. Also, a more localized CPI-U figure would be helpful here to address the recent large gains in Oregon average earnings and how they compare with local inflation, but the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not produce state-level CPI figures.
These numbers come from the monthly Current Employment Statistics program, a federal-state cooperative program in which data are produced by the BLS in cooperation with the Oregon Employment Department. The monthly estimates are based on a sample of businesses that report total pay and total hours for their payroll employees. For Oregon’s November sample data, 788 employers, totaling $235 million of weekly payroll, provided data as a part of the matched sample.