Wage Growth Slowed in April

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

One underappreciated item in the April jobs report was the sharp slowing of wage growth in recent months. This is bad news both for what it tells us about the labor market and also because wages are where workers get their paychecks. Slowing wage growth, especially in the context of rising prices due to tariffs, is very bad news for workers’ pocketbooks.

The annualized rate of wage growth over the last three months dipped to just 2.6 percent in the period from January to April.