Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker (1st Quartile)

The Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker put the lowest quartile at 3.7% for August 2026. A reading above zero means the typical worker in the group was earning more per hour than a year earlier, not counting inflation. The rate is up from 3.4% in August 2025.

The tracker compares each person with themselves. The Census Bureau's Current Population Survey asks about earnings twice, a year apart. The Atlanta Fed matches the two answers, works out each person's change in hourly pay, ranks people by their average hourly wage across the two years and takes the median change in the lowest quarter. Each month's group is a different set of people. The figure shown is a 12-month average of those monthly medians, so it smooths out noise but reacts slowly when wage growth turns. It is the median of individual raises, not the growth of the median wage.

The group is wage and salary earners with earnings at both interviews. Self-employed people, people who lost their jobs and people who changed address are not in it, and the matched sample leans slightly toward older, more educated workers. People are ranked by their own hourly wage, not households by income. The figures are nominal, meaning not adjusted for inflation; a separate page subtracts CPI inflation from this series each year.

The Atlanta Fed revises its history. Its September 2026 release changed values back to 1997 by up to 0.3 percentage point (points on the percent scale, not a percent of the rate), so this page calls a year-over-year change under 0.3 point about the same. A Census change to how top earnings are coded entered the data in April 2024; the Atlanta Fed judged its effect likely modest. The survey did not run in October 2025, during the federal government shutdown, so there is no figure for that month, and October 2026 will have none either.