Dive Brief:
- Earnings for jobs that pay an annual salary grew 2.9% from the first quarter of 2025 to this first quarter of this year, compared to 1.7% for jobs that pay hourly, according to an analysis published Thursday by Indeed Hiring Lab.
- The discrepancy in wage growth exists in almost all high paying, white-collar industries as well as many blue-collar sectors, per the research.
- That means in many industries workers in similar roles “may experience very different pay trajectories” based on what type of compensation structure they’re hired under, “reinforcing broader inequalities in compensation growth and purchasing power,” wrote Sneha Puri, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab.
Dive Insight:
Indeed Hiring Lab analyzed wage data across millions of job postings and found nearly all STEM industries, including industrial engineering, software development, IT systems and solutions, and data and analytics, experienced negative wage growth in hourly job postings. The same was true of marketing and sales.
On the flip side, human resources, accounting, architecture and legal jobs had positive wage growth in hourly job postings — although still below that seen in salaried roles, per the report.
“Posted wages aren’t just about new hires; they tend to mirror what employers are willing to pay across the board. That means that slower growth in wages advertised in job postings is also an indicator of slower pay growth for workers already in those roles,” Puri wrote.
Puri noted that the findings reflect “a familiar labor-market inequality;” salaried workers typically are in higher-income roles and are more likely than those in hourly ones to receive benefits from their employer.
Just 4% of employers gave workers equal, across-the-board salary increases, in place of merit increases, according to a Mercer report from April.
Meanwhile, some workers are finding ways to cash in on their own. Entry-level workers with verified artificial intelligence certifications have been able to secure a 25% salary boost, a Randstad report from May found.
