Posted on February 23, 2022
I see two takeaways from today’s preliminary and incomplete release of the 2021Q3 data on wages from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). First, the data on overall wage growth are lining up with what the corresponding National Income and Product Account (NIPA) data are showing (see chart below). For the first three quarters of 2021 as a whole (compared to the same three quarters in 2020), economywide wages were up by an estimated 8.3 percent (QCEW data, using some estimates by us for the incomplete data) versus 9.0 percent (NIPA data). (We look at the first three quarters combined because the QCEW data can jump around a lot from quarter to quarter because of different calendars.) That slight excess of NIPA growth could indicate a small downward revision to the NIPA wage data that are released tomorrow in the monthly GDP report, but there have certainly been some differences in movements of the QCEW and NIPA wage measures in the past. The second takeaway is that economywide wages grew strongly in 2021, not a surprise. Of that 8.3 percent growth in QCEW wages, increases in employment accounted for about one-third of the increase, while average wages per worker accounted for about two-thirds. We’ll see if NIPA wages, which use the QCEW data as the benchmark when they become available with a lag, get revised down or not tomorrow–soon enough.
