2017 OES Wages for the United States

Here is another post in my useful data series. This one is about wages in the United States, as collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is the data from 2017, which I am using because I have the percentile ranges translated into dollar amounts.

This is interesting because of discussions around what the minimum wage should be. Many states and cities within the United States have higher minimum wages than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. There is a movement to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would mean a pretty large shift in the wage distribution shown here.

So far, the data on minimum wage increases hasn’t shown big disruptions economically. I’m not sure that would hold if we lopped off the whole left side of this wage distribution everywhere at the same time, but I do see the argument that the minimum wage hasn’t kept pace with other economic indicators.