Withholding growth bears a close relationship with growth in aggregate wages as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) and by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as measured in the monthly establishment survey. Withholding can also help predict upcoming NIPA wage revisions.

• Of the past 8 years in which NIPA wages for the prior year were revised by 0.5 percent or more in either direction, in 6 of those cases withholding growth indicated a significant revision in that same direction (see chart below).  The relationship is not tight, but is clearly positive, as indicated by the superimposed trend line. One caveat is that there are only 15 such annual observations, a relatively small number to draw general conclusions.
• The revised measure of NIPA wage growth (measured quarterly, year-over-year) correlates more closely with withholding growth (correlation coefficient of 0.95) than it does with the initial (that is, real-time) NIPA wage releases (correlation coefficients of 0.88 or 0.89, see table below.) That also indicates that withholding growth provides information about the subsequent NIPA wage revisions.
• Withholding growth correlates more closely with (revised) NIPA wage growth (coefficient of 0.95) than does wage growth from the BLS establishment survey (coefficient of 0.93 for both revised and real-time measures of wage growth from BLS).
• The withholding data are available more quickly than all wage measures.